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Computing Space Mission Geometry Using NASA’s SPICE System
Speaker: Charles Acton, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
Wednesday, May 15, 2019
10:00AM-11:00AM Pacific Daylight Time
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Abstract: NASA built the “SPICE” system to help scientists and engineers compute a wide assortment of space mission geometry used in mission engineering, science observation planning, and science data analysis and archiving. SPICE components are free to all, including commercial entities, and are not restricted by ITAR, EAR or licensing rules. SPICE has been used on nearly every worldwide planetary science mission since the time of the Magellan mission to Venus. It is also used on some Heliophysics and Earth Science missions. The SPICE system comprises both data files–called “kernels”–and software, mostly in the form of APIs (subroutines). A SPICE user writes her/his own program to accomplish some task, and that program incorporates just a few SPICE APIs to make the needed geometry calculations. SPICE software is available in Fortran 77, C, IDL, MATLAB, Java Native Interface and Python, and is available for all popular computing environments. The software is thoroughly tested and documented. Source code is provided. The NAIF website contains a comprehensive set of SPICE tutorials and programming lessons, and NAIF offers a free 3-day training class about once every 18 months.
The SPICE system has been implemented and is maintained and extended by NASA’s Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF), located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NAIF and SPICE are supported by NASA’s Planetary Science Division. More about NAIF and SPICE can be found here: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/
Bio: Charles Acton has worked for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab since 1968. After ten years developing optical navigation capabilities he founded the Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility where he worked with planetary scientists to conceive the SPICE methodology for providing missions with important geometry computations.
