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Announcement

Horizons Command-line Interface Conversion

Due to NASA IT requirements, the Horizons command-line interface, currently accessed with “telnet ssd.jpl.nasa.gov 6775”, is being converted from clear-text to standard TLS encryption with optional PKI authentication.

The clear-text interface will continue to be available until at least October 1, 2026, but could become unavailable after that. The encrypted command-line port replacement is available now and has been running over the last year since the initial announcement.

Please check if you are running any automation or scripting that still uses the clear-text port and let us know if the conversion explained below presents unusual cost or difficulty. Automation script examples that might need to be updated include:

Revised versions of these scripts are available as drop-in replacements download here. If possible, it might be a good time to switch to the recent API interface, though that is a more extensive change.

Moving forward, switching to the new encrypted command-line interface requires installation of the open-source ‘stunnel’ tool on your remote systems. See instructions here.

The change could mechanically take only a minute or so, but of course longer to read through.

After ‘stunnel’ is installed on your machine, the updated Horizons connection command would be “telnet localhost 6775”.

‘stunnel’ on the user client-side will then forward the encrypted connection to Horizons. Other than the connection command, nothing else will visibly change with Horizons, so scripts and automation should otherwise continue to function without change.