Cosmographia

"NAIF offers for public use a SPICE-enhanced version of the open source visualization tool named Cosmographia. This is an interactive tool used to produce 3D visualizations of planet ephemerides, sizes and shapes; spacecraft trajectories and orientations; and instrument field-of-views and footprints. Cosmographia has many user controls, allowing one to manage what is displayed, what vantage point is used, and how fast the animation progresses.

Cosmographia originated as primarily a general interest solar system simulator, and it still works wonderfully in that role. However, with permission from the tool's author, NAIF is extending the Cosmographia tool to make use of SPICE kernels to accurately model the observation geometry of planetary missions for which substantial or complete sets of SPICE data are available. With these extensions SPICE-enhanced Cosmographia should also be of interest to professional scientists and engineers.

Cosmographia is a stand-alone application for which executable binaries have been prepared on relatively recent versions of OSX, Windows and Linux.

The Cosmographia installers include SPICE style ephemeris files (SPKs) for all the planets and "major" satellites, plus two asteroids, covering the period from 1950 to 2050. Users can supplement or replace these ephemeris files with ones obtained from the NAIF server.

The SPICE-enhanced version of Cosmographia is free to all persons, including commercial entities, subject to the license and disclaimer provisions linked below. There are no ITAR restrictions on this tool.

Components of SPICE-enhanced Cosmographia available for download provides access to the Cosmographia installers. Also available are the Cosmographia-SPICE Users Guide describing how to prepare JSON files needed to supply SPICE data to Cosmographia, some JSON templates, and some working examples of JSON files (these could also be used as templates). These items can be downloaded separately or as part of the installer. "

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/cosmographia.html

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/cosmographia_help.html

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/SPICE_aware_Tools_List.pdf

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/data.html

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html

https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/tutorials.html

https://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/