Use astroquery to programatically access data in JPL SBDB

[bsipocz]

First of all, this is a super cool project!

I wonder whether you saw that it's possible to query JPL's SBDB, as well as HORIZONS with a python package, astroquery: https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jplsbdb/jplsbdb.html and https://astroquery.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jplhorizons/jplhorizons.html

[dvj]

Better yet, the NAIF SPICE toolkit can be used to generate the trajectories directly from the underlying ephemeris data data that HORIZONS uses.

The SPICE toolkit can be found at: https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/naif/toolkit.html (there is a Python wrapper from https://github.com/AndrewAnnex/SpiceyPy)

and the ephemeris data can be found at https://naif.jpl.nasa.gov/pub/naif/generic_kernels/spk/

This eliminates the need to scrape completely.

A sample script which would gather the data needed for this project is located at https://spiceypy.readthedocs.io/en/master/remote_sensing.html#solution-1

[eleanorlutz]

Thank you for the useful links! I'll take a look at the toolkit tutorials.

I'll leave this issue open in case other people want to chime in, but I've marked it as discussion because it doesn't seem to describe a bug with the existing code.