TRIP is an interactive computer algebra system that is devoted to perturbation series computations, and specially adapted to celestial mechanics. Its development started in 1988, as an upgrade of the special purpose FORTRAN routines elaborated by J. Laskar for the demonstration of the chaotic behavior of the Solar System. TRIP is a mature and efficient tool for handling multivariate generalized power series, and embeds two kernels, a symbolic and a numerical kernel. This numerical kernel communicates with Gnuplot or Grace to plot the graphics and allows one to plot the numerical evaluation of symbolic objects.

CALCEPH accesses binary planetary ephemeris files, including INPOPxx, JPL DExxx ,and SPICE ephemeris files. It provides a C Application Programming Interface (API) and, optionally, a Fortran 77 or 2003 interface to be called by the application. Two groups of functions enable the access to the ephemeris files, single file access functions, provided to make transition easier from the JPL functions, such as PLEPH, to this library, and many ephemeris file at the same time. Although computers have different endianess (order in which integers are stored as bytes in computer memory), CALCEPH can handles the binary ephemeris files with any endianess by automatically swaps the bytes when it performs read operations on the ephemeris file.