PlanetaryPy Documentation

ImportantRequires the instrument packages

This page uses HiRISE and CTX functionality, which ships separately as of planetarypy 0.82.0. Install both with pip install "planetarypy[instruments]"; a core-only install will not have them.

Python tools for planetary science data access.

Key features:

• 90+ PDS index files — auto-downloaded, cached as Parquet, auto-updated
• PDS Catalog — 65 missions, 2042 product types, searchable via DuckDB
• Direct data access — fetch_product("mro.ctx.edr", "PRODUCT_ID") for 58 product types across 15 missions
• 37 SPICE missions — date-filtered kernel subsets via NAIF
• Planetary constants — per-body PCK values (radii, GM, poles) for ~145 bodies plus NSSDC fact-sheet parameters (bond albedo, surface pressure, satellite count, …), time-indexed for reproducibility studies (Zenodo archive); fundamental physics constants (G, c, M_sun) re-exported from astropy in the same namespace
• Unified CLI — plp fetch, plp hibrowse, plp ctxqv, plp catalog build

pip install planetarypy

• Project repository: https://github.com/planetarypy/planetarypy
• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/planetarypy/
• Part of the PlanetaryPy Organisation

How these docs are organized

This documentation follows the Diátaxis approach:

• Tutorials — Step-by-step lessons for learning the package
• How-To Guides — Practical guides for solving specific problems
• Reference — API documentation generated from docstrings
• Explanation — Background information and design decisions

The navigation bar at the top links to these four subsections. Sidebars enable navigation between documents, and the table of contents on the right enables navigation within a document.