[Spice_announce] Advisory Regarding an Upcoming SPICE Training Class

Acton, Charles H (392N) charles.h.acton at jpl.nasa.gov
Thu Apr 3 12:20:09 PDT 2014


Dear colleagues,

NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) is starting to plan for the next, domestic SPICE training class, largely a repeat of the "beginner's" class held many times in the past.  Plans are not yet firm, but given the need for many potential "students" to begin planning well in advance it seems advisable to give the SPICE user community a heads-up now.

It appears we'll conduct this class on the U.S. East Coast, in the vicinity of of Baltimore, Maryland. The current target time is the week beginning October 20th.  (Probably the class would be held on Tuesday through Thursday, October 21 – 23, 2014.)  Of course all of this is To Be Confirmed.

The class will be aimed at those who want to write their own application programs that incorporate some SPICE APIs (subroutines or modules) for needed geometry calculations, using Fortran 77, C, IDL or MATLAB.  The class will consist of SPICE lectures by NAIF staff interspersed with student's open-book programming exercises using exercises provided by NAIF.  The class will use the version N65 SPICE Toolkit, which will become available in May.

It might be possible that NAIF will be able to offer some training on the Digital Shape Kernel (DSK) subsystem, or on use of the WebGeocalc GUI interface to SPICE, both of which are currently under development.  But no promises at this point.

Students will be expected to bring their own laptop computers with the SPICE Toolkit installed and operating, along with a familiar code development tool/environment, in order to take part in the programming lessons--what most folks consider the best part of the class.  Sharing a computer between two or three students and doing the programming lessons as a team is fine.

The class will be open to all, including foreign persons, students in space science or engineering, and people from commercial entities. There will be no charge, but all students are fully responsible for their own travel and living expenses. Attendance could be subject to restrictions if the enrollments exceed the classroom capacity. We hope to accommodate 40 to 50 students.

As usual we must caution that the class could be cancelled by NASA, JPL or NAIF at any time, for any reason.  (It's never happened so far…)

In past years NAIF was able to offer a similar class in various foreign locations. But now the absence of participating scientist programs and general NASA travel restrictions means it is not clear if any such opportunities will exist in the future.

Once the venue and dates are confirmed we'll send out another announcement and open the enrollment process.

Feel free—even encouraged—to forward this announcement to any colleagues who might be interested in this class but who might not be aware of it.

Send any questions to Charles Acton, NAIF Manager.   charles.acton  at  jpl.nasa.gov
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