Earth, Moon and Sun Ephemeris Data for use with Lunar Prospector Data Sets

Some analysis of Lunar Prospector data may require additional ephemeris data for the Earth, Moon and Sun. Below are three versions of Earth, Moon, and Sun ephemeris data provided by the PDS NAIF Node in SPICE format. The NAIF Node can also provide software to work with SPICE files.

Each SPICE file contains ephemeris data for the Earth barycenter, Earth, Moon, and Sun for the time period of January 1, 1998 to January 1, 2000 in the J2000 reference frame. There are three versions of the SPICE file (transfer format, Unix binary format, and PC/Windows binary format). In general the SPICE files are used in a binary format that is dependent on a given computing environment. In order to distribute the data to a variety of environments, the transfer format contains the data in a form that is independent of any particular computing environment. The SPICE toolkit software provides applications to convert the transfer format into a binary format for specific computing environments. Binary formats for Unix and PC/Windows are provided below.

SPICE ephemeris data files

Your browser's "SAVE LINK AS" function can be used to download these data files.

• transfer format - 362k
• binary format for Unix - 154k
• binary format for PC/Windows - 154k

These data are provided by the PDS Geosciences and NAIF Nodes for use by the planetary community and the interested public.

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