[Spice_announce] Looking for Beta-testers
Charles H. Acton
Charles.H.Acton at jpl.nasa.gov
Thu Jan 10 16:11:32 PST 2008
Dear SPICE Users--
For quite some time NAIF has been hard at work on a substantial new
capability--what we sometimes call the "event finding subsystem," or
"the geometry finder." Whatever the name, it will provide a
mechanism to find the times, or time spans, when a user-selected
geometric condition (e.g. transit, occultation) is "true", or when a
selected geometric parameter is within some range (e.g. 15 < phase
angle < 30). And still more.
An overview of the planned system is available in one of our
tutorials: "45_event_finding_preview", located at
http://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/tutorials.html.
It will take a bit more time to get enough of this new subsystem
built and sufficiently tested to offer it for trial use by anyone who
cares to be a "beta-tester." But in preparation for that trial period
NAIF needs to determine in which languages the software must be
offered for beta-testing. Our initial--and current--plan is to offer
it only in ANSI FORTRAN 77 and ANSI C, thus minimizing the amount of
code that will have to be changed in response to user comments, and
also minimizing the amount of time between now and when we are ready
to pass out the beta-test code.
However, it is possible that some or many of you interested in and
willing to be beta-testers would do so only if the code were
available as "Icy" wrappers (IDL), or as "Mice" wrappers (MATLAB).
So my question to you is this: as of now who of you envision
participating in the beta-test activity, and in what language(s)
would you require the code to be for your participation?
FORTRAN 77
C
IDL
MATLAB
Please "check off" all that apply and send your reply back to me.
We'll make our plans according to the feedback we receive. Please
reply no later than January 18th.
While we cannot yet commit to a particular beta-test time frame,
possibly something like the following schedule would be used:
April 1: start beta-test period
June 1: end beta-test period
Aug. 1: next Toolkit release, containing the new event-finding code
Thanks in advance for your interest. (We know everyone is busy...
that's wonderful...so don't feel bad if you can't participate, or if
you're just not interested in this part of SPICE.)
Best regards,
Chuck Acton (on behalf of the NAIF team)
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