lkspacecraft#

This package provides a way to access the orbital parameters for the Kepler and TESS spacecrafts. This will enable you to access

  1. Spacecraft position at any given time with respect to the solar system barycenter, the earth, or the moon

  2. Spacecraft velocity at any given time with respect to the solar system barycenter, the earth, or the moon

  3. The baycentric time correction for any target RA/Dec at any time

  4. The velocity aberration for any target RA/Dec at any time

TESS position with respect to the earth.

Requirements#

This package relies heavily on spiceypy which wraps SPICE. It also relies on astropy.

Installation#

You can install this package with pip using

pip install lkspacecraft --upgrade

You can also install this package by cloning the repo and then installing via poetry

git clone https://github.com/lightkurve/lkspacecraft.git
cd lkspacecraft
pip install --upgrade poetry
poetry install .

Usage#

lkspacecraft provides Spacecraft object which will enable you to access the orbital parameters of either the Kepler or TESS spacecraft. lkspacecraft will obtain the relevant SPICE kernels to calculate the spacecraft position and velocity. To get the orbital elements you will need to pick a time that is within the relevant window of those SPICE kernels (i.e. when the mission was operational).

You can find the start and end times of the kernels using the following

from lkspacecraft import KeplerSpacecraft

ks = KeplerSpacecraft()
ks.start_time, ks.end_time

All times in lkspacecraft use astropy.time.Time objects. Using the get_spacecraft_position or get_spacecraft_velocity functions will provide you with the position or velocity in cartesian coordinates, for example

from lkspacecraft import KeplerSpacecraft
from astropy.time import Time

ks = KeplerSpacecraft()
t = Time("2009-04-06 06:22:56.000025")
ks.get_spacecraft_velocity(t)

will result in

array([[  6.94188023, -26.24714425, -11.16828662]])

This will give the velocity with respect to the solar system barycenter by default, but you can specify the earth or moon using

from lkspacecraft import KeplerSpacecraft
from astropy.time import Time

ks = KeplerSpacecraft()
t = Time("2009-04-06 06:22:56.000025")
ks.get_spacecraft_velocity(time=t, observer="earth")

You are able to calculate the light arrival time of observations of a source at a given RA/Dec using lkspacecraft’s get_barycentric_time_correction function. This will give you the time delay in seconds from spacecraft time to time at the barycenter.

from lkspacecraft import KeplerSpacecraft
from astropy.time import Time

ks = KeplerSpacecraft()
t = Time("2009-04-06 06:22:56.000025")
ks.get_barycentric_time_correction(time=t, ra=290.666, dec=44.5)

Finally you can calculate velocity aberration using

from lkspacecraft import KeplerSpacecraft
from astropy.time import Time

ks = KeplerSpacecraft()
t = Time("2009-04-06 06:22:56.000025")
ks.get_velocity_aberrated_positions(time=t, ra=290.666, dec=44.5)

Units#

In lkspacecraft, just as in SPICE, units are km and s, unless otherwise specified.

Kernels#

lkspacecraft will obtain the SPICE kernels for Kepler and TESS for you store them. Kernels can be found here:

The generic kernels can be obtained from NAIF generic kernels: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_kernels/ The Kepler kernels can be obtained from MAST: https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/kepler/spice/ The K2 kernels can be obtained from MAST: https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/k2/spice/ The TESS kernels can be obtained from MAST: https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/tess/engineering/ https://archive.stsci.edu/missions/tess/models/

When you first load lkspacecraft into Python all the kernels will be downloaded for you. This will take approximately 5 minutes, depending on your internet connection. Once this has been done, the kernels will be cached. If there are new TESS kernels available lkspacecraft will retrieve them for you and update the cache.

The total file volume for the kernels is ~1GB. These cached files are stored using astropy’s cache. If you want to clear the cache you can do either of the following;

from lkspacecraft.utils import clear_download_cache
clear_download_cache()

from astropy.utils.data import clear_download_cache
clear_download_cache(pkgname='lkspacecraft')

Extending lkspacecraft#

If you wanted to extend lkspacecraft to include more spacecraft you would need to include more kernels in the kernel directory and ensure they are added to the meta kernel. You can then create a new class in the spacecraft.py module with the correct NAIF code.

Caveats#

Velocity Aberration vs. Differential Velocity Aberration#

This package will provide you velocity aberration. However, each of these spacecrafts repoint during observations to account for the bulk offset of velocity aberration. If you are interested in where stars will fall on pixels, you should consider calculating the differential velocity aberration.

Spacecraft Time#

This package assumes you will provide time as the time at the spacecraft. For SPOC products, this is the time in the 'TIME' column of any fits file, with the time corrections from TIME_CORR subtracted. i.e.

t = np.asarray(hdulist[1].data['TIME'], dtype=float)
tcorr = np.asarray(hdulist[1].data['TIMECORR'], dtype=float)
# Spacecraft time:
t -= tcorr

If you are trying to accurately calculate time corrections, it is important you use the spacecraft time in all functions.

Changelog:#

v1.0.5

  • Added a function for calculating DVA

v1.0.4

  • Made Python version >=3.9 compliant

v1.0.3

  • Added ability to calculate velocity aberration on an array of RA/Decs.

  • Added ability to calculate barycentric time correction on an array of RA/Decs.

v1.0.0

  • First version