#1 Implement INPOP ascii to ephcom binary converter

[Alan W. Irwin]

The INPOP planetary and time ephemerides are published in (among other formats) a unique ascii format. To make those data accessible to ephcom an application needs to be implemented to read data in the INPOP ascii format and convert it to ephcom binary form.

[Alan W. Irwin]

This implementation of this converter is feature-complete but tests still have to be designed to wring out the remaining bugs.

This implementation added two new functions to the ephcom library. The new function foreign_ephcom_readascii_header reads all ascii header information required by ephcom from files written in foreign (to ephcom) ascii formats (such as that of the INPOP group). The new function foreign_ephcom_readascii_block reads an ephcom-standard block of Chebyshev coefficient data from files written in foreign (to ephcom) ascii formats (such as that of the INPOP group). These functions are designed to read various foreign ascii formats depending on their kind_ascii argument. Currently only kind_ascii=1 (referring to the INPOP ascii format) is implemented for these two functions, but additional foreign ascii formats can be added as needed.

The actual converter application that has been implemented is called ephcom_INPOP_asc2eph. The main routine for that application opens the required 15 (!) files holding the header information and Chebyshev coefficients in INPOP ascii format, calls foreign_ephcom_readascii_header and foreign_ephcom_readascii_block as needed, and writes results to an ephcom standard binary ephemeris file using ephcom_writebinary_header and ephcom_writebinary_block.

[Alan W. Irwin]

This project is almost done.

With commit e827f74 I have been able to show a good comparison between inpop10e ascii results that ephcom_INPOP_asc2eph converted to ephcom binary form with inpop10e results in traditional JPL binary format that ephcom could read directly. That verifies the implementation of ephcom_INPOP_asc2eph in the inpop10e case. I plan to generalize that check to all inpop ephemerides to finish up my work on this project.

[Alan W. Irwin]

As of commit 4ef9189 a comprehensive test that compared JPL-formatted results published by INPOP with ephcom_INPOP_asc2eph-generated results passed without issues. Therefore, this feature-request has been successfully implemented, and I am therefore closing it.