Appendix: NPB for PDS3 Archives

NPB is capable to generate PDS3 SPICE kernels data sets increments. This capability is not intended for people external to NAIF and is only adept for PDS3 data sets archived by or for NAIF.

For PDS3 archives, NPB follows the PDS3 standard and uses NAIF’s PDS3 archiving approach [PDS3GUIDE]. The NAIF PDS3 archiving guide document is available under: naif-pds4-bundler/docs/spice_archiving_guide.txt

There might be some concepts and/or words used in this chapter that you might not know or understand, if so please take a look at the documents that describe the PDS3 standards. These documents are available at the PDS3 Data Standards page.

Configuration File Particulars

PDS3 archives require several modifications to the NPB configuration file that are not documented in section The Configuration File.

Use the MSL, the MRO or the JUNO configuration file examples as references. They are provided under: /Users/mcosta/pds/naif-pds4-bundler/tests/naif_pds4_bundler/config

The most relevant change is the inclusion of the PDS3 Mission Template element. This element incorporates the so called Mission Template Configuration File used to generate PDS3 labels with the NAIF utility MAKLABEL.

Finally, another particularity is that the meta-kernels and ORBNUM files must have an entry in the Kernel List section. The value of the mklabel_options and descriptions elements is irrelevant, you can use N/A.

Using NPB for PDS3 Archives

You can use NPB for PDS3 archives exactly in the same way that you would for a PDS4 archive. The only differences being present in the content of NPB’s logging. Please refer to section Using NPB, for more information.

Binary kernels endianness in PDS3 archives

NAIF requires all their PDS3 archives to have BIG-IEEE binary kernels. The same applies to “old” archives from other agencies (ESA, JAXA) such as Mars Express (mex-e_m-spice-6-v1.0), Venus Express (vex-e_v-spice-6-v1.0), Rosetta (ros-e_m_a_c-spice-6-v1.0), and Hayabusa (hay-a-spice-6-v1.0).

The only intentional exception to this rule are DSKs in the DAWN archive (dawn-m_a-spice-6-v1.0) which are LTL-IEEE.

For “recent”, PDS3 ESA archives (vex-e_v-spice-6-v2.0, mex-e_m-spice-6-v2.0, and ro_rl-e_m_a_c-spice-6-v1.0) and for JAXA’s Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki (co-v-spice-6-v1.0) archive endianness is set to LTL-IEEE.

Known differences from archives generated with NAIF’s PDS3 archiving approach

When generating a PDS3 data set increment with NPB compared to following the NAIF’s PDS3 archiving approach -which implies using the NAIF utility MAKLABEL and several Perl scripts such as label_them_all.pl, xfer_index.pl, and mkpdssum.pl-. The following differences are known and are accepted by NAIF:

  • MAKLABEL introduces a whitespace in the empty lines of the comments with attached labels for binary kernels. This whitespace is not present with NPB.

  • The order of the items in the INDEXED_FILE_NAME field of the INDEX file label is alphabetical with NPB but somewhat “random” with xfer_index.pl.