In 2007, a small group of people began an intentional, collaborative experiment in open, transparent, and direct communication about your space program. Our goal was to enable your direct participation in exploring and contributing to NASA’s mission.

Many of us have since begun new adventures. This site will remain as an archive of the accomplishments of the openNASA experiment.

Open Source at NASA

By Nick Skytland, 05 April 2011
 Nick Skytland

As David Wheeler said in his presentation at the NASA Open Source Summit on March 27th, 2011, “you are breaking the law of you don’t consider open source software development in your projects” – and he’s absolutely right! So that got me thinking, how many Open Source software projects has NASA actually released in the last year? Here’s the answer: 20. What’s disappointing to me is that the majority of the official release came from only one center – and in that regard Ames Research Center is truly a trailblazer at NASA when it comes to Open Source Software. Our hope in Open Government is that this number will star to exponentially increase moving forward and that all NASA centers will start to participate. We recognize that many people many not release with an open source license because there are too many barriers in place to do so.

We are an invested stakeholder in helping solve that problem, but it will take some time. Therefore, I wanted to inspire you with concrete examples of the open source success stories from around the agency. The list below is the 20 projects that released software open source this past year (the release date is listed in parenthesis). These are the trailblazers! These projects are all active and it’s likely that most of the people who worked through the current software release process are still involved. I encourage you to reach out to the project leaders, learn from their experience, and let them serve as an example of what is possible in your space program!

Ames Research Center (15)

  1. Savors: A Scalable Aural-Visual Environment For Security Event Monitoring, Analysis, And Response (5/28/10)
  2. Ballast: Balancing Load Across Systems (5/28/10)
  3. Diaper: Dynamic Perimeter Enforcement (5/28/10)
  4. Save: Synchronization, Archival, Validation, and IP Exchange (5/28/10)
  5. Highly Scalable Matching Pursuit Signal Decomposition Algorithm (MPD) (6/25/10)
  6. Nebula 0.1 (7/15/10)
  7. GeoCam v2 (8/31/10)
  8. Parallel Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition (8/31/10)
  9. NASA Nebula Cloud Computing Infrastructure Configuration/Builder (6/10/10)
  10. Mcp: Multi-threaded Copy Program (9/27/10)
  11. Virtual Sensor (12/28/10)
  12. Rover Software (RoverSW): a modular, extensible software framework for exploration robots (v1) (12/6/10)
  13. Netmark eXtensible DataBase, Data Access and Retrieval Composition (1/14/11)
  14. AutoBayes - Automatic Design of Customized Analysis Algorithums and Programs (1/27/11)
  15. Multiple Kernel Anomaly Detection (MKAD) Algorithm (1/27/11)

Goddard Space Flight Center (4)

  1. Orbit Determination Toolbox (5/5/10)
  2. Goddard Satellite Data Simulation Unit (2/16/11)
  3. Simple, Scalable, Script-based Science Processing Archive (S4PA) (1/13/11)
  4. SAIC Algorithm Testbed For Asteroid Detection (SALTAD) verison 1.5 (10/7/10)

Marshall Space Flight Center (1)

  1. Lunar Mapper v1 (2/25/2011)

All other NASA Centers (0)

  • None