NASA

Modern science is driven by computations and simulations. NASA, as a space agency, has been working on various state-of-the-art programs for space and Earth and often launched software to power their research efforts. But to everybody’s surprise, NASA has recently announced that it is making its computational innovations available to the general public for free download. Although the software developed by NASA was originally designed to address simulations of climate, space weather, and astronomical phenomena, the space agency believes that it can mitigate real-world problems. Over 800 open-source software by NASA is available to laymen today. Open source software rarely comes to our mind when we talk about spacetech and its missions. It takes an enormous amount of time and an uncountable sum of money to build something that can function properly in outer space. Keeping these in mind, NASA is making its open source software public to associate with worldly problems. The American space agency thinks that these programmes based around aeronautics, autonomous systems, data processing, system testing, and image processing can be used on the Earth to solve real-world problems like climate change, global warming, disease diagnostics, wildlife conservation, etc. The open source software by NASA is unleashed to the public through its Technology Transfer programme. IndustryWired has listed the top open source software provided by NASA.

Top open source software by NASA

CODE

CODE is software used by NASA for the control and observation of resources, services, and applications. By using this open source software to address real-world issues, users can securely transform information and data to other programs and enable the secure execution of actions on remote computers.

Mission Simulation Toolkit (MST)

Spacetech companies give extra care to software that works on remote modes. Space missions mostly function without the intervention of humans, making the machines or systems capable of operating autonomously. Mission Simulation Toolkit (MST) is one such software that supports research in autonomy for remote exploration. The software allows developers to test models in a high-fidelity simulation and then evaluate system performance against a set of integrated and standardized simulations.

Livingstone 2

Today, manufacturing houses are increasingly turning automatic. In order to deploy end-to-end surveillance, organizations are using diverse technologies to keep away unprecedented accidents and machine malfunctions. Similarly, NASA is using Livingstone 2, a reusable artificial intelligence software system designed to assist spacecraft, life support systems, chemical plants, or other complex systems in operating robustly with minimal human supervision, even in the face of hardware failures or unexpected events.

Sound Lab

Sound Lab is software that can be easily deployed and used in real-world circumstances. It is a software-based, real-time, virtual acoustic-environment rendering system designed to study spatial hearing. Sound Lab can be employed at concert halls, listening rooms, virtual reality, aviation spatial information display, and video game sound effects.

Visual Environment for Remote Virtual Exploration (VERVE)

VERVE is very helpful for researchers and scientists and helps in exploration science operations. The software is a 3D visualization system that provides situational awareness, science analysis tools, and data understanding capabilities to robotic researchers.

Neo-Geography Toolkit (NGT)

Converting unstructured data into useful insights is hectic. Especially, when the data is in image or video format, acquiring the proper information from it gets critical. Fortunately, now, the layman can use Neo-Geography Toolkit (NGT) to transform raw geospatial raser data from remote sensing instruments into useful cartographic products, including visible image base maps and topographic models.

Robot Application Programming Interface Delegate (RAPID)

Not just NASA, many other spacetech companies are also developing robots that could travel to space. Their ideal destination is Mars. Similarly, NASA is using RAPID, a software reference implementation framework for remote operations to promote interoperability between robot software modules. It also includes a standard programming interface and data distribution middleware. By getting their hands on the open source software, spacetech companies can gear up their performance.