[Spice_announce] Announcing new NAIF Toolkit (N0058)

[Charles H. Acton]

Dear Colleague-

NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility is pleased to 
announce the availability of the next version of the NAIF Toolkit: 
Version N0058. Complete packages (recommended), or individual 
executables for the applications that are part of the Toolkit, may be 
obtained from the NAIF website for all supported environments: 
http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov.

The "README" text file provides instructions for downloading and 
installing the Toolkit packages.

The "dscriptn.txt" text file describes the complete contents and 
organization of the Toolkit package.

The "whats.new" text file details all the additions, revisions and 
bug fixes that comprise this release of the Toolkit.

Chief among the new capabilities is a major extension to the SPICE 
reference frame system, called "parameterized dynamic frames." This 
extension allows users to construct a wide assortment of new kinds of 
reference frames based on dynamic directions computed using SPICE 
kernel data (SPKs, CK, PCKs).

(A future version of the NAIF Toolkit is expected to go a step 
further in this direction by offering script-based frame definitions.)

The new frame capabilities, including examples, are discussed at 
length in the updated "Frames Required Reading" document (frames.req) 
available in the /doc directory of the installed Toolkit and 
available in text, html and pdf formats under the Documentation page 
of the NAIF website.

Also new in this Toolkit are:

   - SPK and CK coverage APIs (subroutines)

   - planetographic coordinate conversion APIs

   - a new "L-sub-S" API (longitude of the sun), named LSPCN

   - a substantial augmentation to the "Icy" interface (Interactive 
Data Language)

   - addition of built-in SPICE IDs for a number of new spacecraft, a 
comet, and three earth stations

Support for the PC/CYGWIN/g77 and PC/CYGWIN/gCC environments has been 
added, while support for SGI and DEC Alpha computers has been 
terminated.

As always, this Toolkit is freely offered to the worldwide space 
science and space mission engineering community. (Rules governing its 
use are posted on the NAIF website.) Please feel free to forward this 
announcement to any of your colleagues who could be interested.

Thanks to Bill Knopf of NASA's Solar System Division, and Dr. Barry 
Geldzahler of NASA's Mission and Systems Management Division, for 
providing the SPICE development funding.  And thanks to the hundreds 
of scientists and engineers around the world whose use of SPICE, and 
whose suggestions for improving and extending it, have made the 
enterprise a success.

-- The NAIF Team

The SPICE system has been produced and is maintained by Caltech's Jet 
Propulsion Laboratory under contract to the U.S. National Aeronautics 
and Space Administration.
-- 


Charles.H.Acton at jpl.nasa.gov                       Phone (818) 354-3869
Navigation and Ancillary Information Group/JPL     Fax   (818) 393-6388
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