Open Standards Planned For Next NASA Telescope

BobB writes "A NASA infrared space telescope called the 'James Web Space Telescope' is scheduled to be launched in 2013. The plan is that it will be built using open standards-based software designed to prevent problems caused when software programs developed by various agencies are incompatible with each other, as has been the case with the Hubble telescope. From the article: 'Though open standards has become common in the business sector, Matthews says this is the first time NASA has used the IBM Rational system. "This is a fairly major shift in approach for NASA," he says. "They traditionally have been very conservative in their adoption of new technologies and new tools, but I think they've found that conservative approach just doesn't hold up when you start to reach a [certain] size and complexity."'"

Comments

typo: James WEBB Space Telescope

[davidwr]

I was all set to make a "Universe-Wide-Web" joke then I checked the spelling.

Fixing this typo is a job for your friendly neighborhood slashdot-editor-man.

Better than Windows

[RandomPsychology]

...because initially, MS went for the bid (attempting to dominate the space business), but NASA has (apparently) gotten wiser and moved away from satellites that BSOD at random.

Re:Better than Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

In space, no one can hear you blue screen.

Re:Better than Windows

[Teresita]

"NASA has (apparently) gotten wiser and moved away from satellites that BSOD at random."

Buggy Spontaneous Orbital Decay?

yes..

[macadamia_harold]

This is a fairly major shift in approach for NASA," he says. "They traditionally have been very conservative in their adoption of new technologies and new tools, but I think they've found that conservative approach just doesn't hold up when you start to reach a [certain] size and complexity.

Yes, complexity, like converting english measurements to metric.

Re:yes..

[Anonymous Coward]

but I think they've found that conservative approach just doesn't hold up when you start to reach a [certain] size and complexity.

Yeah, NASA has no experience working with complexity. The Apollo spacecraft and the Space Shuttle are just so primitive compared to a new Ford truck with Microsoft auto software.

Or it might just be that NASA realizes that a slow evolutionary change of their systems is better than a revolutionary change that is 50% more efficient but blows a rocket up.

This change to open standards follows that. NASA first found something that worked and now they are slowly adjusting it. 'Conservative' may be a bad word in politics (for some), but it is a very good word in engineering. To most engineers I know, being called a non-conservative engineer is the same thing as being called an idiot.

Re:yes..

[jd]

Major shift? Conservative? This is the same NASA that broadcast NASA Select over CU-SeeMe and also the Multibone, allowed Donald Becker to develop network drivers for Linux, opened the source of a great many Computational Fluid Dynamics packages, promoted the early development of Beowulf Clusters, published guidelines on how to identify barbarian invaders, has hosted talks by SETI folks, investigated AJAX-style applications in the mid 1990s and was routinely helping the Open Source community years before any business would go near it?

Now, I think they make some extremely stupid decisions at times. I think that half their management is an extreme liability to their operations, the safety of their astronauts and the quality of their science. I also think they are desperately underfunded and have developed something of a siege mentality. However, "conservative" is not a term I'd associate with them, and they are most certainly familiar with "Open Standards" - having either invented them or were early adopters.

This is merely where they should have been all along, based on their own practices and their own connections with the IT industry. Far from calling it revolutionary, I'd consider it merely evolutionary.

Reamed with the Rational Rose-bush

[amightywind]

I used Rational Rose in a large avionics project. I can honestly say it is the worst piece of software I have ever encountered. This push comes from the suits at NASA glad handing their buddies at IBM. It cannot come from the programmers.

Re:Reamed with the Rational Rose-bush

[HangingChad]

I used Rational Rose in a large avionics project. I can honestly say it is the worst piece of software I have ever encountered.

I'll second that. Worked next to a project that was built in four months by two primary programmers, a DBA and two analysts. The customer brought EDS in to take over long term maintenance and they wanted to move everything over to Rational for managing change requests. Today there are 30 people on the project and what used to take hours now takes months. Where they used to spend 10's of thousands they now spend 100's of thousands.

They brought in EDS because they didn't think they were getting good value from the team that built the original application.

Rule 1: Forget Rational

Rule 2: Never give a working application to EDS.

Re:Reamed with the Rational Rose-bush

[Utopia]

I agree.

Having worked with Rational Rose I can that if NASA is using Rational then the "major shift" is in the wrong direction.
I had to use Rational because of a push from management for a company-wide use of Rational.
A really bad decision in opinion. Too many bugs and clunky workflow makes the software utter crap.

Re:Reamed with the Rational Rose-bush

[feronti]

I definitely have to agree about Rose. I can't speak to XDE (or whatever they call it now), but RealTime sucks goat balls, at least if you're developing in C++. First, if you want to use the STL, you have to add it to the model yourself (granted, that's a problem with pretty much every model-driven development tool... you'd think it'd occur to someone that they should include models for standard libraries). Unfortunately, their code analysis tool sucks, so if you try to use that to reverse engineer the libraries you're using, it'll take more time than just adding the classes by hand.

Second, it doesn't properly understand templates... if you want to declare a template function, you need to define an empty macro to use as the return for the function, and then put the entire template declaration into the name field, otherwise it won't generate the correct code. If you want to create a class that inherits from an instantiation of a template, you have to first create an instantiated class (essentially a typedef naming the parameters to the template), unless the new class itself is a template, in which case you can do the inheritance directly. It's also terrible for doing round-trip engineering, since it only allows you to make changes in specific marked places in the code, so if you discover you need a new attribute or whatever, you can't just add it and have it show up in the model on the next round trip... you have to round trip it, and then add it in the model and regenerate the code.

All that said, it does have some nice things, too... the RealTime Services Library is (mostly) well designed, though some of the design decisions they made seem rather arbitrary (e.g.: you can dynamically resize the replication of a port, but you can't dynamically resize the replication of a capsule role).

and Quantity

[Anonymous Coward]

Astronomers possibly would love a cluster of space telescopes. Amongst other heavenly bodies the discovery of new planets might well skyrocket as difference in images is analyzed constantly and continuously. Imagine on earth a spherical planetarium with the collective view of all those telescopes displayed with all items not in previous database marked in some fashion for study and possible naming other then the automatic naming necessary by the computer system to add the new sighting to the database. This cluster could be keyed on some predetermined criteria to shift focus to certain events detected.

Plenty of ideas to be filled in there, maybe some to be thrown out as this AC is not a scientist nor really understands beowulf clusters sufficiently. The Joe Taxpayer in me is sitting on my shoulder telling me to shut up, anyway I probably should have just said:

"Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Telescopes"

Ironic

[truthsearch]

"They traditionally have been very conservative in their adoption of new technologies and new tools"

That's an exceptionally ironic statement to make about an organization responsible for space exploration.

Re:Ironic

[Indigo]

It does sound pretty funny, but in the specific context of flight software, it's true. When sending something complicated and expensive into space, you don't want it running bleeding edge code. You want to stick to the tried and true, even boring, stuff. Granted, there are missions that push the software envelope, but for those missions it's done deliberately and treated as a risk, not just because someone doesn't want to seem old fashioned.

Interesting spin job

[wrmrxxx]

The decision to buy IBM's product is being spinned by this article as if it's some kind of win for open standards, but there isn't anything significantly open going on here. As far as I can tell, they've adopted Rational Rose for diagramming/design and Clearcase for version control. Both of these products are closed source applications, and both store their data in closed, priority formats. There's nothing open about either of them. The best you could say is that NASA is using an open modelling language (UML), but of course that exists entirely independantly of the IBM product - I can use UML with a pencil and the back of an envelope.

If NASA really wanted to do something for openness (and delivering American taxpayers value for money), they'd be using Subversion, not ClearCase.

Both Rational and ClearCase are examples of the worst in their category of software. I've used many types of version control software, but ClearCase was the worst of all by far. This software was not purchased because NASA was particularly interested in open standards. Rational and ClearCase usually only get purchased because some manager had a very successful golf game with an IBM rep or still reasons that "nobody ever got fired for purchasing IBM".

Matthews is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on multiple NASA projects in the 1990s. During the mid-90s we used Rational http://www-306.ibm.com/software/rational/ for a short period of time (6 months) then dropped it. IME, the people who want these tools are architect that couldn't program their way out of a paper bag. Since Ive become an architect now, I prefer Visio http://www.microsoft.com/office/visio/ to most of these other tools - that's only if a pencil drawing doesn't cover everything good enough AND I need to make a presentation to someone with money.

IBM has many nice tools and the best bang for your buck hardware, but Rational ought to be buried into a deep, dark hole with a RADIOACTIVE sign outside. http://www.nmsu.edu/~safety/images/signs/sign_caut ion-rad-mat.jpg

I agree

[wasted]

but I think they've found that conservative approach just doesn't hold up when you start to reach a [certain] size and complexity.

Yeah, NASA has no experience working with complexity. The Apollo spacecraft and the Space Shuttle are just so primitive compared to a new Ford truck with Microsoft auto software.

Or it might just be that NASA realizes that a slow evolutionary change of their systems is better than a revolutionary change that is 50% more efficient but blows a rocket up.

Knowing one or two folks who work for NASA, and having met more than that, I think that they would move toward open source so it can be peer reviewed, which would result in the evolutionary change. Of the people I have met, the average IT staffer troubleshooting Word installations is way more conceited than any of the shuttle astronauts I have met. (About five that I know of, and probably at least a couple more, not that it matters.) NASA folks work to accomplish a mission, and their egos are pretty much non-existant except in the context that they have been part of the team that accomplished a specific mission. If John Doe off of the street offers an optimal solution, they will grab it, test the heck out of it, and use it if it works. Then, after the successful mission, they can say, "I was a part of that" when it comes up at cocktail parties.

Then again, I may have only met the best of NASA, and others who work there may have a better grasp on their corporate culture.

I'll believe it'll work...

[solitas]

...after I SEE it work. After all, the HST needed unanticipated 'eyeglasses' before IT was fully operational (and even then they still had to do lots of software correction afterward).

FIO: what software runs the HST? Custom, I would imagine.

Re:Barbarian Invaders?

[jd]

This gem first appeared on NASA AMES' webserver. It got featured on Slashdot at the time. After AMES was rebuilt from the wreckage left after their webserver exploded, all copies at NASA were purged. However, the Slashdot archives include the original link and writeup, so proof does exist that this truly is a NASA document.

Re:sharing

[ColdWetDog]

Because "live feeds" from the Hubble would look like digital noise. It's NOT a web cam. The ground controllers send up very specific commands for the satellite to do very specific things. It acquires the data and transmits it back, then the data has to be analyzed carefully. Much of it isn't even imagery - just numbers. I have no idea exactly what format the data comes down in, but it's not going to be a .jpg.