SPICE.jl

SPICE.jl is a Julia wrapper for the SPICE toolkit which is provided by NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF). It provides functionality to read SPICE data files and compute derived observation geometry such as altitude, latitude/longitude and lighting angles. Please refer to its comprehensive documentation if you are not yet familiar with SPICE.

Note: This project is not affiliated with NASA, NAIF or JPL in any way.

Installation

julia> import Pkg; Pkg.add("SPICE")

Quickstart

using SPICE
using Downloads: download

const LSK = "https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_kernels/lsk/naif0012.tls"
const SPK = "https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_kernels/spk/planets/de440.bsp"

# Download kernels
download(LSK, "naif0012.tls")
download(SPK, "de440.bsp")

# Load leap seconds kernel
furnsh("naif0012.tls")

# Convert the calendar date to ephemeris seconds past J2000
et = utc2et("2018-02-06T20:45:00")

# Load a planetary ephemeris kernel
furnsh("de440.bsp")

# Get the position of Mars at `et` w.r.t. Earth
spkpos("mars_barycenter", et, "J2000", "none", "earth")

Notable differences to CSPICE

SPICE.jl follows the Julia language's style and conventions which introduces the following differences to CSPICE.

SPICE.jl does not wrap all CSPICE functions since many general purpose utilities already exist in Julia's standard library or can be approximated with a Julia one-liner. If you try to call an unwrapped function, SPICE.jl will return a deprecation warning that shows the equivalent Julia code.
Functions that mutate one of their input arguments are suffixed with ! and the to-be-mutated argument will be the first parameter, e.g. wninsd!(window, left, right) instead of wninsd(left, right, window).

Next Steps

Please refer to the API reference.