ANISE: Attitude, Navigation, Instrument, Spacecraft, Ephemeris

A modern, high-performance toolkit for space mission design and operations.

NASA TRL 9: ANISE was used throughout the operations of the Firefly Blue Ghost lunar lander, from launch until successful landing.

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Introduction

Tired of the usual complexities, global state, and lack of thread safety in legacy astrodynamics toolkits? ANISE is a fresh, Rust-powered alternative to the NAIF SPICE toolkit, engineered for modern computing environments.

Whether you are plotting a trajectory to Mars, orienting a constellation of satellites, or performing massive parallel analysis on the cloud, ANISE provides the tools you need to get it right.

Why ANISE?

Space missions demand precision, but modern engineering demands efficiency and safety.

Feature	CSPICE / SpiceyPy	ANISE
Thread Safety	No (Global state/locks)	Guaranteed (Rust ownership)
Performance	Single-threaded	Parallel (many queries)
Math Validation	Runtime errors	Type-safe Frame checks
API Style	Procedural (Integer IDs)	Object-Oriented / Pythonic
Serialization	None	S-Expressions (Cloud Native)

ANISE supports many SPICE kernels. Binary kernels are supported as-is, while text kernels must be transformed into their ANISE equivalent (usually .pca or .lka files).

Kernel Type	Supported	Note
BSP / SPK	✅	Supported as-is
BPC	✅	Supported as-is
TK (Text)	🔄	Supported after transformation
LSK	🔄	Supported after transformation
GM	🔄	Supported after transformation
CK	❌	Yet to be supported
SCLK	❌	Yet to be supported
DSK	❌	Yet to be supported
IK / EK	❌	Yet to be supported

Supported SPK Types

For more details on SPK types, refer to the NAIF SPK Required Reading. The following table summarizes the types supported by ANISE.

SPK Type	Interpolation	NAIF SPICE	ANISE	Typically used in
Type 1	Modified Differences	✅	✅	NASA internal trajectory tools (e.g. DPTRAJ)
Type 2	Chebyshev Triplet	✅	✅	Planetary ephemerides (e.g., JPL DE series)
Type 3	Chebyshev Sextuplet	✅	✅	Planetary ephemerides (e.g., JPL DE series)
Type 5	Discrete states	✅	❌	Two-body propagation
Type 8	Lagrange (Equal Step)	✅	🧪	Uncommon spacecraft trajectories from numerical integration
Type 9	Lagrange (Unequal Step)	✅	✅	Spacecraft trajectories from numerical integration
Type 10	Space Command TLE	✅	❌	Please don't use TLEs, a punch-card format (no joke)
Type 12	Hermite (Equal Step)	✅	🧪	Uncommon spacecraft trajectories from numerical integration
Type 13	Hermite (Unequal Step)	✅	✅	Spacecraft trajectories from numerical integration
Type 14	Chebyshev Sextuplet (Unequal Step)	✅	❌	Never seen in the wild, probably good for slow-moving objects
Type 15	Precessing Conic Propagation	✅	❌	Precessing conic elements
Type 17	Equinoctial Elements	✅	❌	NAIF docs
Type 18	ESOC/DDID Hermite/Lagrange Interpolation	✅	❌	NAIF docs
Type 19	ESOC/DDID Piecewise Interpolation	✅	❌	NAIF docs
Type 20	Chebyshev Triplet (velocity only)	✅	❌	NAIF docs
Type 21	Extended Modified Difference Arrays	✅	❌	NAIF docs

Note: 🧪 means the SPK type is supported but no public SPK of that type could be found to validate the implementation. Please provide one if you have one!

Architecture

ANISE is a "Core + Bindings" ecosystem. The heavy lifting is done in Rust, ensuring maximum performance and safety, which is then exposed to your language or tool of choice.

graph TD
    Data[Kernels: SPK, PCK, LKA] --> Core
    Core["ANISE Core (Rust)"]
    Core --> Bindings[Bindings & Tools]
    Bindings --> Py["Python (anise-py)"]
    Bindings --> CLI["CLI Tools (anise-cli)"]
    Bindings --> GUI["Visualizer (anise-gui)"]
    Bindings --> CPP["C++ (Coming Soon)"]

Loading

Key Features

• Universal Loading: Seamlessly load SPK, BPC, PCK, FK, TPC, and the new LKA (Location Kernel Anise) files.
• Analysis Engine: A declarative system to define engineering reports and events using S-Expressions. Define complex queries (eclipses, line-of-sight) on a client and execute them safely on remote workers without arbitrary code execution risks.
• Time System Mastery: Extensive support for all time systems (TT, TAI, ET, TDB, UTC, GPS) powered by the hifitime library.
• Rigid Body Physics: Validated high-precision translations, rotations, and rigid body transformations.
• Frame Safety: ANISE checks that all frame translations or rotations are physically valid before performing any computation.
• Concurrency: Designed for modern hardware. Forget about mutexes and race conditions; ANISE guarantees thread safety.

The Ecosystem

This repository contains the entire ANISE suite:

🦀 ANISE Core (Rust)

The heart of the project. Direct access to the full range of features, memory safety, and robust error handling.

• Location: ./anise
• Docs: API Documentation

🐍 ANISE Python

First-class support for Python. Leverage Rust's speed without leaving your favorite scripting environment. Includes Jupyter notebooks and tutorials.

• Location: ./anise-py

🖥️ ANISE GUI

A graphical interface to inspect your data files. Quickly check segment start/end times in any time scale (including UNIX UTC seconds) for SPK, BPC, and PCA files.

• Location: ./anise-gui

⚙️ ANISE CLI

Command-line utilities for quick file inspection, downloading test data, and converting kernel formats.

• Location: ./anise-cli

Validation

We rigorously validate ANISE against SPICE. Our validation workflow runs:

• Over 100,000 queries on the DE440.bsp file.
• 7,305 queries for each frame in the PCK08 file (covering 20 years of data).
• Thousands of rotations from Earth's high-precision BPC file.

A Note on Precision: The PCK data from the IAU is based on polynomial approximations expressed in centuries past J2000. While legacy toolkits use floating-point arithmetic for time, ANISE uses hifitime (integer arithmetic) for all time computations. You might see discrepancies of up to 1 millidegree in rotation angles, but this represents ANISE's higher temporal precision avoiding floating-point rounding errors.

Resources and Assets

Nyx Space provides several important SPICE files for your convenience:

• de440s.bsp: JPL's latest ephemeris dataset (1900-2050).
• de440.bsp: JPL's long-term ephemeris dataset.
• pck08.pca: Planetary constants kernel (ANISE format), built from JPL's gravitational data.
• moon_fk_de440.epa: A Moon frame kernel built from JPL data.

Note on Lunar Frames: For accurate lunar work, we recommend using the moon_fk_de440.epa file with moon_pa_de440_200625.bpc (Principal Axes) and an ephemeris file (e.g., de440.bsp), rather than the low-fidelity IAU Moon frame. See moon_de440_220930.txt for details.

Contributing

ANISE is an open-source project, and we welcome contributions! Whether you want to request a feature, report a bug, contribute code, or improve the documentation, we appreciate your help.

License

ANISE is distributed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL-2.0). This license allows you to use ANISE in both open and proprietary software, with the requirement that any modifications to the ANISE source code are also released under the MPL-2.0.

For more details, see the full license text or a summary on GitHub.

Acknowledgements

ANISE is heavily inspired by the NAIF SPICE toolkit and its excellent documentation.

Contact

Have questions or feedback? Open an issue on GitHub or email the maintainer at [email protected].