rspice is a Ruby wrapper around CSPICE, NASA JPL's cross-platform library for various astronomical calculations, including ephemerides calculations based on the JPL's ephermeride files.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rspice'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rspice

rspice is intended for use with the various JPL ephemerides. The test folder contains a short-term DE405 planetary ephemeris file as well as supplementary files for defining the planetary constants like mass and ellipsoid, and reference frames for the moon and the earth. These files are included in the distribution entirely for test purposes; rspice should be compatible with any JPL kernel which cspice itself works with.

The CSPICE library maintains several important global state variables, including a list of loaded kernels, error state, and probably others I don't know about. As a result, CSPICE itself is NOT thread safe; you must never call into CSPICE from multiple threads, even if the calls are being made to entirely different methods. This is probably not a problem given the giant lock in MRI 1.9.3, but if you somehow work around that you are still stuck serializing all calls into CSPICE.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request