Report of the IAU Commission Working Group on Standardizing Access to Ephemerides and File Format Specification: Update September 2014

J. L. Hilton, C. Acton, J.-E. Arlot, S. A. Bell, N. Capitaine, A. Fienga, W. M. Folkner, M. Gastineau, D. Pavlov, E. V. Pitjeva, V. I. Skripnichenko, P. Wallace

Proceedings of the Journées 2014 "Systèmes de Référence Spatio-Temporels", Z. Malkin and N. Capitaine (eds), Pulkovo observatory, 254-255 (2015)

Abstract

The IAU Commission 4 Working Group on Standardizing Access to Ephemerides recommends the use of the Spacecraft and Planet Kernel (SPK) file format to provide a uniform format for the position ephemerides of planets and other natural solar system bodies. The Working Group also recommends the use of the binary Planetary Constants Kernel (PCK) format ephemeris file for the orientation of a body. It further recommends supporting data be stored in a text PCK. Since the previous report: • Some minor changes have been made to the formats for: – the coordinate time ephemeris – data types 20: Chebyshev Polynomials (Velocity Only) and 120: Chebyshev Polynomials (TCB:Velocity Only) • the working group’s final report is currently undergoing review by the Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF) of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to assure it correctly describes these file format.