[1] SPICE was developed at NASA's Navigation and Ancillary Information Facility (NAIF), located at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
These files provide information such as spacecraft trajectory and orientation; target body ephemeris, size and shape; instrument field-of-view size, shape and orientation; specifications for reference frames; and tabulations of time system conversion coefficients.
These tools are provided as subroutine libraries in four programming languages: C, FORTRAN, IDL, MATLAB and Java Native Interface.
The SPICE data, Toolkit software, tutorials and programming lessons are all freely available from the NAIF website.
Prospective users are cautioned that it takes some effort to learn to use this software: it is primarily provided for professionals in the space exploration business.