[Spice_announce] News from NAIF 12-20-2011

[Acton, Charles H (343N)]

Dear SPICE Users,

2011 has been a year of ups and downs for the worldwide planetary science community. It seems 2012 holds out promise for more accomplishments, but also brings funding challenges to many of our agencies and teams.

The NAIF Team at JPL is fortunate to be in good financial shape. We look forward to continuing our development and refinement of the SPICE system, and to providing support to SPICE users worldwide, consistent with NASA rules and available resources.

We were pleased to add Samantha Krening ("Sam") to the NAIF Team in July. Sam will help out in all aspects of NAIF work.

We now hope to release the version N65 Toolkit in the March time frame--somewhat delayed from earlier plans. It will contain a number of "small" items and some bug fixes; no major new capabilities. We are also continuing work on shape model additions (tessellated plate model and digital terrain model), on the Java Native Interface to the Toolkit (JNISpice), on additions to the "geometry finder" subsystem (GF), and on a WWW GUI interface to SPICE (currently being called WebGeocalc).

We are soon to begin working with some JPL colleagues to extend the SPICE SPK system slightly to accommodate requests of the IAU Ephemeris Access Working Group so that SPK may be used to access the plant ephemeris data produced by the JPL, French and Russian groups involved in this kind of work.

In the flight project arena we are starting to work on MAVEN (GSFC), OSIRIS REx (Univ. of Arizona) and SMAP (JPL, earth science) while working towards finishing up SPICE deployment for Grail (JPL), Juno (JPL) and MSL (JPL).

We understand SPICE will be used on Solar Probe (APL) and is under consideration for use on Solar Orbiter (ESA) and BepiColombo (ESA).  ExoMars, Luna-Glob, Luna-Resurs and still other possible future (planetary) missions might also end up using SPICE; only time will tell.

In partnership with ESA in April we will conduct a SPICE training class at the ESAC facility near Madrid (details are TBD), and of course we'll continue the more-or-less annual training class near Pasadena, California. We hope to be able to offer an advanced class in the not too distant future.

Along with the rest of the Planetary Data System nodes, and with participation of the International Planetary Data Alliance member agencies, NAIF will be migrating its SPICE archives to the new PDS4 standards over the next year or two. This should help improve user's access to archived SPICE and science data wherever these new standards are used in national archives.

As always we are happy to hear your suggestions about how to improve the SPICE system and NAIF services to the community. (Even if we are not very quick to react in many cases.)

All the best to you and your colleagues for an exciting and rewarding year ahead!

--The NAIF Team

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