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The SPICE Toolkit

The current SPICE Toolkit version is N0065, released July 23, 2014

The SPICE Toolkit is comprised of several items.

  1. A large collection of user-level application program interfaces (APIs) and underlying subroutines and functions, provided as source code with extensive user-focused documentation (code headers).
  2. A ready-to-use library made from the APIs, subroutines and functions described in 1.
  3. A small set of ready-built utility (application) programs, along with their associated User Guides. These are programs thought to be of use to many SPICE users. (Additional utility programs are available from the Utilities link on the NAIF website.)
  4. A set of technical reference documents—one for each major SPICE functional area.
  5. A few additional documents that describe the contents and structure of a Toolkit package, highlight and provide small usage examples of the most popular APIs, and provide a permuted index based on the abstracts for all modules.

The SPICE Toolkit is offered in the languages listed below. For each language it is available for several computing environments (platform/operating system/compiler). The Toolkit version number shown above applies to all of these environments.

NAIF has not yet implemented a Python binding to CSPICE, but a number of SPICE users have produced their own, partial interfaces. Links to two of these are found here. While NAIF has reason to believe these two products are of good quality, NAIF has not examined these for correctness or completeness, so potential users of these interfaces should take some caution.

NAIF also has an "alpha-test" Java Native Interface (JNI) set of toolkits that are awaiting some documentation and a few code updates before becoming official products. But these have been in use for several years and are considered of sufficient quality to be released to interested persons. Contact NAIF if interested.

SPICE Utility Programs
Any of the SPICE utility and application programs available in the Toolkit may be obtained individually from this location, along with an ASCII version of the associated User's Guide. This on-line collection includes additional utilities that are NOT provided in the Toolkit packages mentioned above.

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