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IERS Message No. 9                                           April 24, 2001
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First Release of the SOFA Software Libraries

The IAU's SOFA (Standards Of Fundamental Astronomy) initiative seeks to
promulgate an authoritative set of fundamental-astronomy constants and
algorithms. The work is carried out by a panel called the SOFA Review
Board, the membership of which was agreed just prior to the 1997 General
Assembly.

The Board is pleased to announce that a first release of software is now
available. The SOFA software libraries are a collection of subprograms,
in source-code form, that implement official IAU algorithms for
fundamental-astronomy computations. The subprograms at present comprise
27 "astronomy" routines supported by 52 "vector/matrix" routines, all
written in Fortran. In future releases, the astronomy library will expand,
and implementations in other languages will be introduced.

For further details please see the SOFA Center's website at
http://www.iau-sofa.rl.ac.uk/.

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Dennis D. McCarthy                       dmc@maia.usno.navy.mil
Director, Directorate of Time            phone: (202) 762-1837
U.S. Naval Observatory                   fax: (202) 762-1563
Washington, DC 20392-5420

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