Tesseroids is a collection of command-line programs for the direct modeling of gravitational fields in spherical coordinates. It can model the gravitational potential, acceleration, and gradient tensor.
The geometric element used in the modelling processes is a spherical prism, also called a tesseroid. Tesseroids also contains programs for modeling using right rectangular prisms, both in Cartesian and spherical coordinates.
Tesseroids is developed by Leonardo Uieda in cooperation with Carla Braitenberg.
As of version 1.1, Tesseroids is licensed under the BSD license (see LICENSE.txt). This means that it can be reused and remixed with fewer restrictions.
You'll find the documentation for Tesseroids on Read the Docs:
http://tesseroids.readthedocs.org/
The docs contain installation instructions, usage, theorerical background, and some examples.
You can also download a PDF version of the docs here.
If you use Tesseroids for your research, please cite it in your puclications:
Uieda, L. (2013), Tesseroids: Forward modeling of gravitational fields in spherical coordinates, figshare, http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.786514, doi:10.6084/m9.figshare.786514.
See file CITATION.txt for more information and BibTex entries.
You can download the source and binary distributions from the project site.
If you downloaded a pre-compiled binary distribution, simply unpack in the desired directory.
The executables will be in the bin folder, the pdf documentation in the doc folder, and example scripts in the cookbook folder.
To build Tesseroids you'll need:
Tesseroids uses the build tool SCons. A SConstruct file (Makefile equivalent) is used to define the compilation rules. You will have to download and install SCons in order to easily compile Tesseroids. SCons is available for both GNU/Linux and Windows. Building should work the same on both platforms.
SCons requires that you have Python installed. Check the SCons website for more information. Python is usually installed by default on most GNU/Linux systems.
Under Windows you will have to put SCons on your PATH environment variable in order to use it from the command line. It is usually located in the Scripts directory of your Python installation.
On GNU/Linux, SCons will generally use the GCC compiler to compile sources. On Windows it will search for an existing compiler. We recomment that you install GCC on Windows using MinGW.
First, download a source distribution. Unpack the archive anywhere you want (e.g., ~/tesseroids or C:\tesseroids or whatever). To compile, go to the directory where you unpacked (e.g., ~/tesseroids etc.) and type in a terminal (or cmd.exe on Windows):
sconsThe executables will be placed on a bin folder.
To clean up the build, run:
scons -cThis will delete all object files and executables.
After the compilation, a program called tesstest will be placed in the directory where you unpacked the source. This program runs all the unit tests in the test directory. If all tests pass, the compilation probably went well. If any test fails, please submit a bug report with the output of tesstest.