Numerical representation of planetary ephemerides

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory provides high-precision numerically integrated planetary and lunar ephemerides in support of spacecraft navigation and other activities relating to solar system bodies. Hundreds of users around the world have requested copies of the ephemerides. In the interests of compactness and utility, techniques have been developed for (1) the generation of the coefficients of an interpolating polyncmial based on output from the integrator, and (2) transformation of the contents of an ephemeris file to a standard form usable on virtually any computer.