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The Software of Space Exploration
David Boswell writes "The O'Reilly Network is running an article called The Software of Space Exploration that looks at a number of the software projects that NASA has released as open source under their NOSA license. It explores how they are using other free and open source projects for use in some of their missions. Information about the European Space Agency and other space organizations is also covered." From the article: "A number of tools allow you to track objects in space, from asteroids to shuttle missions. A consortium of scientists working in the field of celestial mechanics has released OrbFit as free software under the GPL. This software can compute the orbits of asteroids and predict an asteroid's future position. You can also track artificial satellites with several free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom options. Amateur radio enthusiasts use Linux and these tools to hear transmissions from the space station or from other satellites in Earth orbit."
The article discusses NASA WorldWind but several interesting links are missing. Amongst them: Punt, a WW fork. Heck, you can also see Microsoft Virtual Earth data in NASA WorldWind itself. Even Mars 3D in WW. (I stop here, if this interests you, read slashgeo.org ;-))
I don't know if Stellarium counts as "software for space exploration", but it's worthed. Celestia too.
Animoog.org
Your tax dollars paid for it. Download it here.
http://www.nasatech.com/software/
There's some seriously interesting software in there.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
John has been very generous with his code throughout the years and I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen (unless he has outside investors that would object)
Or the government. I'm certain the software is classified as a munition under ITAR(International Trade in Arms Regulation). He'd require an export license to make it available. I'm not entirely sure he could even get one, the powers that be have become extremely picky about what they allow.
Worst...sig...ever!
Yes, it is public domain. And as such NASA has exactly the opposite problem from most organizations when trying to contribute back to open source.
NASA's licensing
If I remember correctly the European Space Agency's mission control system (processes the spacecraft telemetry, on the ground) is open source. Currently they are using SCOS-2000. But the best a quick search came up with was via this article on XMM.
Masses of space/astronomy open source packages, see
www.openastro.com
NASA developed NASTRAN, one of the most popular and powerful Finite Element Analysis programs, a long time ago and released it to the public. http://www.openchannelfoundation.org/projects/NAST RAN/
Ed Burnette did a great job of documenting the talk at http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/?p=41
Disclaimer: I work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and I am speaking only for myself.
I'm working on some opensource software released under the NOSA license.
The general opensource website for GSFC is http://opensource.gsfc.nasa.gov/
The software that I am specifically working on is called the OS Abstraction Layer (OSAL). If you code to its API, it will allow you to run code on a VxWorks, RTEMS, Linux, or Mac OS X system. It was designed for embedded flight software use. There will be a new version out in a few months that will employ memory protection. Believe it or not, but memory protection for flight systems has been very hard to do in the past.
Even better, it's online. A good chunk of the Apollo Guidance Computer documentation (including the assembly source code to Collossus 249, which was the guidance computer program) is available here.
Fascinating stuff.
Worst...sig...ever!