[Spice_announce] SPICE Greetings from Pasadena

[Charles H. Acton]

Dear friends-

The NAIF Team--Ed, Nat, Boris, and Chuck--extend our best wishes to 
you for pleasant holidays and great success in the new year. May you 
all find just the right SPICE kernel in your stocking, and just the 
right subroutine waiting patiently on your computer's desktop.  :)

Here at "NAIF Central" we feel like the past year has ended up pretty 
well. We are especially pleased to have all export concerns behind us.

We have seen several new projects begin SPICE deployment, and we've 
had inquiries from some others about doing so.

Those of you who have already downloaded the just released version 
N61 Toolkit are hopefully finding the new hyperlinked HTML 
documentation helpful. Those of you still "stuck" on an older 
Toolkit, we urge you to take the little bit of time needed--now--to 
upgrade to version N61: you should find it fully backwards 
compatible, and so should be able to link "old" applications against 
the N61 library without need for any changes to your code.

We are planning new goodies for SPICE users in the coming year, such 
as the Matlab interface to SPICE, an integrated shape model 
subsystem, and a large suite of geometric event finding software. 
(Exactly when available... don't ask us just yet.) We also aspire to 
continuously improve our current offerings.

We try to keep up with answering your questions about using SPICE, 
although with so many active customers this is sometimes a real 
challenge. We hope to improve our tutorial materials and lessons to 
make your job of learning to use SPICE as easy as possible. (Our next 
SPICE training class will probably be held in May, in the Pasadena 
area--stay tuned for more on this.)

Please let us know your recommendations for improving SPICE 
capabilities and NAIF services... whether now or any time during the 
coming months.

--The NAIF Team

-- 
Charles.H.Acton at jpl.nasa.gov                       Phone (818) 354-3869
Navigation and Ancillary Information Group/JPL     Fax   (818) 393-6388
================================================================================
NAIF website: http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov
SPICE news:   http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/mailman/listinfo/spice_announce