[AstroPy] satellite-centered ephemeris

[Miguel de Val-Borro]

Hi Jonathan,

I have looked at the SPICE tutorials on the ephemeris subsystem and it
looks that it does what I want. However I need the SPK kernel for the
Herschel satellite that I could not find in the NAIF server or at the
ESA SPICE webpage. Do you know if this kernel is publicly available
somewhere?

Regards,
Miguel

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 09:37:17AM -0700, Jonathan T. Niehof wrote:
> On 01/10/2012 08:41 AM, Miguel de Val-Borro wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I would like to calculate RA and Dec of solar system objects at the
> > position of the Herschel satellite. This can be done in the on-line JPL
> > Horizons system setting the observer to @herschel, however I would like
> > to calculate the coordinates from the orbital elements of Herschel and
> > the object at different times. I have checked that pyEphem Observer
> > object supports positions on Earth's surface; is there any available
> > package where I can use the orbital elements of a satellite to define
> > the observer frame?
> 
> Miguel--
> Are you familiar with JPL's NAIF/SPICE library? It's C-based and would 
> probably have something that would work for this. We've been (slowly) 
> wrapping it in Python here, but don't have distribution permission yet. 
> I can probably knock loose "share with collaborators" permission if you 
> find a function in there that seems useful.
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Niehof
> ISR-3 Space Data Systems
> Los Alamos National Laboratory
> MS-D466
> Los Alamos, NM 87545
> 
> Phone: 505-667-9595
> email: jniehof at lanl.gov
> 
> Correspondence /
> Technical data or Software Publicly Available