[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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