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®.