About

Did you know that 26 comets and asteroids have already been visited by a spacecraft ? And that there will be many more in the coming years ?

I am a planetary scientist, exploring small bodies with missions like Rosetta, Hera, and Comet Interceptor.
Over the years, I have written many tools to investigate the data returned by these spacecrafts. As much as I can, I like to share my programs with the community, in the hope they may be useful for others.

This website contains my publicly available software, and is maintained on my free time. You can find more information about my research on my personal page.

Tools:


All tools can be accessed via the navigation menu on this page.

Open source

The content of this website is distributed under a BSD license, available in the header of each file.

The code can be consulted directly from the sources of these webpages (Ctrl+U in Firefox and Chrome).
It can also be accessed and improved through a public repository hosted by Sourcehut.

The source code of shapeViewer is very complex and open sourcing the more technical parts requires properly commenting and organizing the code, which will take some time but will definitely happen in the near future. All algorithms and data necessary to evaluate the scientific output of the software are provided in the user manual.

Terms of use

I kindly ask each publication making use of my tools to include the relevant acknowledgement:

Finson-Probstein diagram:
This research has made use of the scientific software at www.comet-toolbox.com
(Vincent, J.-B., Comet-toolbox: numerical simulations of cometary dust tails in your browser, Asteroids Comets Meteors conference, 2014, Helsinki)

shapeViewer:
This research has made use of the scientific software shapeViewer (www.comet-toolbox.com). Vincent et al. shapeViewer, a sofware for the scientific mapping and morphological analysis of small bodies, LPSC, (2018).