SPICE kernels management

The planetary-coverage is a SPICE based application which requires a set of kernels to work. Usually these kernels are provided by space agencies. For example, for the ESA-Juice mission, these kernels can be found in ESA SPICE service FTP server inside the Juice folder.

The planetary-coverage provides two command line interfaces (CLI) that can be used in your terminal to download a list of kernels from the different space agencies. See SPICE download CLI section for more details.

Knowing which kernels are required for your needs can be complicated, but usually, your kernel provider should give you a metakernel listing all the kernels recommended for a specific configuration. For ESA, these metakernels can be found on ESA SPICE service website and the ESA SPICE bitbucket registry.

The planetary-coverage provides also an interface to download automatically the latest version of ESA metakernels for you.

Tip

If you want to manage your kernels on your own, you should take a look at this notebook to see how you can do it efficiently.