CKVIEW – a multi-mission planning tool

Kurzfassung

The development of CKVIEW started around 2001 when we began to plan the close flybys of the Cassini spacecraft near the Icy Saturnian satellites. At this time the Cassini project provided tools to calculate the pointing but there was no option to validate the pointing or to check the coverage and overlap of mosaics on the surface of these satellites. CKVIEW was then not only used by the DLR members of the Cassini imaging team but was also shared with other groups in this team. CKVIEW was written using the interactive programming language IDL which provides support for data handling (particularly matrix operations) and routines to create a Graphical User Interface (GUI). The core of the calculations is mainly based on the SPICE toolkit [1]. The first version of CKVIEW contained only the basic functions: loading of SPICE kernels, defining imaging times, plotting footprints on the Sky, plotting them in a map projection on the target body, and calculating a resolution map. The Cassini camera was the only supported instrument. Additional framing cameras from other missions were added over the years e.g., VMC on Venus Express, FC on Dawn, MDIS on MESSENGER, SRC on Mars Express, and AMICA on Hayabusa. A major step was the addition of the first line sensor, the HRSC on Mars Express. CKVIEW was recently adapted for the planning of upcoming missions from ESA (JUICE, which will fly to the Jovian system) and from NASA (Psyche, which will fly to the eponymous asteroid Psyche, and Lucy, which will study some Jupiter trojans).