[Spice_announce] Announcing New NAIF Toolkit - Version N61

[Boris Semenov]

The NAIF Team is pleased to announce the availability of a new version 
of the NAIF Toolkit -- Version N61. Additions and changes are summarized 
in the "whats.new" file that accompanies each Toolkit package, and that 
is also available under the Toolkit link off of the NAIF website home 
page (http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov). Below we summarize the major changes.

As always the Toolkit software is designed and expected to be backwards 
compatible. Unless you were taking advantage of one of the few bugs in 
this software you may safely link your own application program to the 
N61 library of choice (Fortran, C or IDL) and expect to get the same 
results as when using the N60 (or earlier) libraries.

NAIF has added five new computing environments to its supported list, 
including support for the "new" Intel Macs. At the same time NAIF has 
dropped support for all HP and VAX environments. The Toolkit is now 
supported on nine Fortran environments, nine C environments, and six IDL 
environments. See the "whats.new" file for a complete and detailed list 
of all supported environments. NAIF asks that you *NOT* attempt to port 
the Toolkit to an unsupported environment: your effort will almost 
certainly not be successful as there are a number of subtleties that 
must be properly addressed.

Based on many customer suggestions NAIF now provides all documentation 
in HTML, complete with hyperlinks. This should make your use of the 
extensive SPICE documentation much easier. See the "whats.new" for more 
details about this. (There are a few residual problems with this our 
first go at hyperlinking "all" documents. We'll hope to fix these few 
problems by the time of our next Toolkit release.)

Two new applications are present in the N61 Toolkits.

   - MSOPCK converts attitude data provided in a text file as UTC, SCLK, 
or ET-tagged quaternions, Euler angles, or matrices, optionally 
accompanied by angular velocities, into a type 1, 2, or 3 SPICE C-kernel.

   - SPKDIFF computes differences between geometric states obtained from 
two SPK files and either displays these differences or shows statistics 
about them.

See the MSOPCK and SPKDIFF user guides for details about function and 
operation.

A number of new object-name/object-ID mappings were added to the list of 
built-in mappings.

See the "whats.new" for a detailed list of bug fixes made with this 
delivery.

For your information, work continues on three major new capabilities 
that we expect to offer in future Toolkit releases:

   - A Matlab interface to SPICE
   - The addition of a tesselated plate model and a digital elevation 
model to the existing shape modeling facility (tri-axial ellipsoid model)
   - A very substantial set of new codes useful in finding "orbital 
events" such as transits, occultations and elongations, as well as local 
extrema and times when a geometric quantity is within a user-specified 
range of values.

The NAIF Team hopes you will find the new and improved capabilities of 
the N61 Toolkit useful. As always we solicit your comments and 
suggestions for making SPICE better and easier to use.


For the NAIF team of Ed Wright, Boris Semenov and Nat Bachman,

Chuck Acton,
NAIF Manager
Charles.H.Acton at jpl.nasa.gov