Planetary coverage documentation#
The planetary-coverage package is a toolbox to perform surface coverage analysis based on orbital trajectory calculations. Its main intent is to provide an easy way to compute observation opportunities of specific region of interest above the Galilean satellites for the ESA-Juice mission but could be extended in the future to other space mission.
It is actively developed by the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers Nantes Atlantique (OSUNA, CNRS-UAR 3281) and the Laboratory of Planetology and Geosciences (LPG, CNRS-UMR 6112) at Nantes University (France), under ESA-Juice and CNES founding support.

Installation#
Note
If you have access to a Jupyter environnement, ie. a local JupyterLab or a remote JupyterHub, like ESA DataLabs, we recommend to use the first method of installation.
The latest version of the planetary-coverage
is 1.1.0
and is available on Python Package Index (PyPI)
and conda-forge.
You can install it with pip
or conda
:
Hint
If you need to perform pointing simulations for the ESA-Juice
mission.
You will need to install an optional dependency (esa-ptr
). More details can be found here.
In your Jupyter environment, go to File > New > Notebook
to create a new notebook and in the first cell, type:
%pip install planetary-coverage
Execute the cell with ⇧ Shift + ↵ Enter and you should get the latest version of the planetary-coverage
.
You can check which version was installed, restart the Jupyter kernel and run the following command:
%load_ext planetary_coverage
Recommended
If you want to use the planetary-coverage
directly in your terminal or
in your REPL,
we recommend to encapsulate it in a virtual environment (venv
)
to avoid any conflict with your default python environment:
python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
If you don’t use a virtual environment, we recommand that you add a --user
flag to the command below.
Then install the package:
pip install planetary-coverage
You need to add conda-forge
to your channels:
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda config --set channel_priority strict
Optional
If you want to isolate the planetary-coverage
from your (base)
environment, we can create a dedicated
conda environment like this:
conda create -n planetary-coverage python=3.10
conda activate planetary-coverage
Then install the package:
conda install planetary-coverage
This method is recommend only if you need to install the development version from the source.
Required
You will need to install Poetry (≥1.4
) on your system.
On Linux/macOS/Windows (WSL) you can do:
curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
Clone the source from the Gitlab repository:
git clone https://juigitlab.esac.esa.int/python/planetary-coverage.git
cd planetary-coverage
and install the package and its development dependencies:
poetry install
All the dependencies will be installed in an isolated virtual environment. Then, you can either prefix your commands with:
poetry run <my-cmd>
or activate directly the virtual environment:
poetry shell
Changes and updates#
The planetary-coverage
adheres to semantic versioning,
ie. the version number will have the following pattern:
MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
New releases are available on irregular basis. All the changes are reported in the changelog.
If you want to get the latest version, you need to add a --upgrade
flag to the installation command above.
How to cite this package#
If you use this package for your analyses, please consider using the following citation:
Seignovert et al. 2023, Planetary coverage package (1.1.0), planetary-coverage.org, swh:1:rel:8416d4a23e2d695ce68c35f22aace9281c25dbaa
or can use this BibTeX file.
Issues and feedback#
If you have any issue with this package, we highly recommend to take a look at:
this documentation (the search bar on the left is there for you)
If you did not find a solution there, don’t hesitate to:
open an issue, if you have an account on the Juice Gitlab
send us an email at contact@planetary-coverage.org
The planetary-coverage
is distributed under a open-source
BSD-3 clauses license.
Bug reports and contributions are encouraged and always welcome.