The Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) provides NASA planetary flight projects and NASA funded professional planetary researchers an information system named "SPICE" to assist scientists in planning and interpreting scientific observations from space-based instruments. SPICE is also widely used in engineering tasks associated with planetary missions.

SPICE is focused on solar system geometry. The SPICE system includes a large suite of software, mostly in the form of subroutines that customers incorporate in their own application programs to read SPICE files and to compute derived observation geometry, such as altitude, latitude/longitude, and lighting angles. SPICE data and software may be used within many popular computing environments. The software is offered in FORTRAN, C, IDL® and MATLAB®.