Note

I was lost after reading through the basics of SPICE from SPICE tutorials. I wanted practical tutorials, but spiceypy (basically a 2017 version of SPICE lessons) did not fulfill my needs.

Then I found Space Science Tutorial repo by Thomas Albin to be extremely helpful, so I decided to learn them by myself. I changed multiple code lines to my taste & performance issues, so this repo is a "summarized version of the original material, for intermediate-level python users who have basic knowledge of space science."

• If you are a beginner in python, I think their original materials and exhaustive "medium" articles will be great learning materials for you.

1. Part 01: Basics of spiceypy
2. Part 02: Movement of the Solar System Barycenter (SSB, id=1) over time with respect to the Sun.
3. Part 03: SSB-planet distance for Giant planets, find correlation between SSB-Sun-planet angle (Jupiter governs the SSB location)
4. Part 04: A practice to find an "observable window" (using the phase angles of [Sun, Earth, Venus, Moon])
5. Part 05: A practice to plot [Sun, Venus, Mars, Moon] on the Ecliptic and Equatorial Coordinates (aitoff)
6. Part 06: Calculating the "state vectors", orbital elements, conversion matrix between reference frames (ECLIPJ2000), and orbit of an NEO.
7. (Part 07: Merged into Part 08)
8. Part 08: Query the IAUMPC comets DB, add some info, and save as a SQL DB
9. (Part 09: Omitted ∵ it's a simple visualization that can be fun for students)
10. Part 10: A practice to calculate the T_Jup parameter in e-i space for different a, make a GIF.
11. (Part 11: Omitted ∵ it's a simple visualization that can be fun for students)
12. (Part 12: Omitted ∵ it's a simple visualization that can b fun for students)
13. Part 13: 67P orbital (osculating) elements calculation near Jupiter encounter, compare with IAUMPC.
14. Part 14: Finding close-approach time by gfdist and simple note on the "insufficient ephemeris" error.
15. Part 15: Minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of a comet.
16. (Part 16: Omitted ∵ it's about magnitude system, not related to SPICE)
17. Part 17: Orbit uncertainty by tracing multiple samples
18. (Part 18: Omitted ∵ it's more about statistics)
19. (Part 19: Merged into Part 20)
20. Part 20: Movement of Ceres over time on Ecliptic lon-lat space.
21. (Part 21-23: Omitted ∵ it's more about python packaging, not related to SPICE)

Later, I may try looking into their youtube materials and merging them here.

GitHub: https://github.com/ThomasAlbin/Astroniz-YT-Tutorials