[Spice_announce] Announcement

[Charles H. Acton]

The Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) Team at JPL 
sends its best wishes for a relaxing and exciting holiday.

We will be busy--as will some of you--supporting the Mars Express 
start of orbit operations (Dec 25), Stardust encounter with comet 
Wild 2 (Jan 2), and Mars Exploration Rover landings and surface 
operations starting on Jan 4 and Jan 25, respectively.  We'll support 
Cassini orbit operations at Saturn starting in July. Let's hope they 
are all successful and give everyone much work in the year(s) ahead. 
In the mean time we continue to regularly process data from Mars 
Global Surveyor, Mars Odyssey, Cassini cruise, and Genesis.

We offer our regrets to the team at JAXA that worked so hard to save 
Nozomi from the effects of a solar flare. The results of these 
efforts were remarkable, even if ultimately not leading to a 
successful Mars orbit insertion. Surely this experience will benefit 
all future missions there.

With plans already in place (or nearly so) for working on all 
upcoming NASA planetary missions, and with some prospective for use 
of SPICE on a growing number of foreign planetary missions, we are 
honored and excited to have a continuing role supporting the 
worldwide science and engineering communities in solar system 
exploration.

This year we have been especially pleased to be able to work with 
colleagues at ESTEC in The Netherlands and at the widely dispersed 
Mars Express science team institutions in Germany, France, Italy, 
Sweden and England, to realize a small measure of international 
cooperation. It's been a long learning process, but we hope the 
Project Science Team and the PI teams will soon begin to see a good 
return on their investment in learning how to use SPICE.

On occasion I quickly scan the FTP logs from the naif server, and am 
both surprised and pleased to see how many different sites around the 
world are downloading the SPICE Toolkit and assorted SPICE kernel 
files.

While supporting ongoing missions and preparing for new ones is a 
major activity for our small team, we are well aware of the need to 
continue adding new capabilities to SPICE and to improve the current 
capabilities and the data archiving and distribution processes. We 
have a large "work list" to help steer our development efforts. Of 
course we also appreciate your suggestions in this regard.

I anticipate the release of the next SPICE Toolkit in early CY 2004, 
featuring "Icy:" the first official release of our Interactive Data 
Language (IDL) interface to SPICE. It will also bring much improved 
headers for the most used FORTRAN and C modules.

Amongst other things, we are working on:
   - A large family of event-finding modules (e.g. transit, 
occultation, periapsis passage, etc., etc.)
   - Java Native Interface for SPICE
   - Digital terrain data closely interfaced with SPICE
   - Shape (plate) model for small, irregularly shaped bodies
   - Run-time SPK and CK generation
   - Dynamic reference frames
   - Regular updates of high-precision earth orientation files (binary PcK)

If you have any questions about SPICE--past, current or future, or 
comments/suggestions, please feel free to contact Chuck Acton 
(Charles.Acton at jpl.nasa.gov) or any of the NAIF Team members.

Here's wishing all of us high precision and much success in 2004!

Chuck Acton, Nat Bachman, Lee Elson, Boris Semenov, Ed Wright