spiops

spiops is a library aimed to help scientists and engineers that deal with Solar System Geometry mainly for planetary science. More in particular is aimed to assists the users to extend the usage of SPICE.

SPICE is an essential tool for scientists and engineers alike in the planetary science field for Solar System Geometry. Please visit the NAIF website for more details about SPICE.

Introduction

spiops is a python library thar uses SpiceyPy to use SPICE Toolkit APIS to provide higher-level functions than the ones available with SPICE. This functions have been idenfitied from having to implement multiple time a series of SPICE APIs to obtain a given derived functionality.

Functionalities vary from the computation of the illumination of a given Field-of-View to obtaining the coverage of a given S/C for a particular meta-kernel.

The underlying idea of spiops is to be used as a multi-user and multi-disciplinary pool of re-usable SPICE based functions to provide cross mission and discipline support of SPICE for ESA Planetary and Heliophyiscs missions.

spiops is developed and maintained by the ESA SPICE Service (ESS).

Installation

First install the dependencies (spiceypy, pytest) for the project. Then run pip install spiops to install from pypi.

If you wish to install spiceypy from source first download or clone the project. Then run python setup.py install. To uninstall run pip uninstall spiceypy.

Documentation

The spiops docs are available here. The documentation for spiops is intentionally abridged so as to utilize the excellent documentation provided by the NAIF. Please refer to C and IDL documentation available on the NAIF website for in-depth explanations. Most of the functions docstrings have a link to the corresponding C function in the NAIF docs that the function is based on.

How to Help

Feedback and new functionalities are always welcome, if you discover that a function is not working as expected or if you have a function that you believe can be of interest to other people please open an issue or contact me.

Citing spiops

If the use of spiops is used in a publication, please consider citing spiops, SpiceyPy and the SPICE toolkit. The citation information for SPICE can be found on the NAIF website and the citation information for SpiceyPy in the GitHub repository.

Known Working Environments:

spiops is compatible with modern Linux and Mac. At this development stage and with the available resources is hard to guarantee an extension of the compatible working environments. If you run into issues with your system please submit an issue with details.

• OS: OS X, Linux
• CPU: 64bit
• Python 3.5

Acknowledgements

spiops makes an intensive usage of SpiceyPy, a Python wrapper for the NAIF C SPICE Toolkit (N66) by AndrewAnnex.

We have to be very grateful to Andrew for having brought SPICE to Python!