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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."
NASA should be commended for embracing open source software in some of their applications. Much of what they do would benefit greatly from the efforts of a community which is most supportive of their goals. I used to work as a contractor at NASA doing data reduction algorithms on Landsat, and that would be an ideal app for open source efforts. The data is public, so why not the software related to it as well?
Granted, there are some things that require the kind of expertise and customization that open source wouldn't be appropriate for, and I'm sure some of NASA's efforts are classified. But wherever it's reasonable, open source is a supurb idea. Imagine how many CS geeks would love to contribute to NASA just for the fun of it!
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
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!
You mean free as in cheese
NASA is also doing work using Eclipse as a rich client platform. They had a talk at EclipseCon about using Eclipse for the Mars rovers.
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/
That means the terrorists will get ahold of it, track some meteors, and alter their course so they crash into a landmass of their choice! Open source is bad!
</scarasm>
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!