Recently in Software Category

NASA Clears The Runway For Open Source Software

"The NASA Open Government Initiative has launched a new website to expand the agency's open source software development. Open source development, which invites the public access to view and improve software source code, is transforming the way software is created, improved and used. NASA uses open source code to address project and mission needs, accelerate software development and maximize public awareness and impact of research."

Total Lunar Eclipse brings SkySafari to Android

"The iOS versions of SkySafari have been downloaded more than 900,000 times from the iTunes Store. SkySafari has won multiple awards, including a MacWorld 2010 Best-of-Show, Sky & Telescope Magazine's Hot Product award for 2012, and an endorsement by Astronomers Without Borders. SkySafari is the only mobile astronomy app which can correctly reproduce this December's total lunar eclipse, or any other. SkySafari's Plus and Pro versions have the largest database of any mobile astronomy app, and are the only ones which can control backyard telescopes."

USPTO Launches $50,000 Imaging and Text Recognition Innovation Challenge on TopCoder-Powered NASA Tournament Lab

"TopCoder(R), Inc., the leader in online programming competition, skills assessment and competitive software development, today announced the opening of registration for a new $50,000 contest to develop new and innovative algorithms to aid the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in patent review."

apps@NASA Now NASA Launches apps@NASA

"NASA launched apps@NASA, a website where NASA employees and contractors can download mobile apps that securely access NASA systems. These apps enable our users to perform critical job functions at anytime from anywhere via personal and NASA mobile devices.

This is part of a full suite of services that is provided by the NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (NEACC). The NEACC resides at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. It is supported by SAIC under the Enterprise Applications Service Technologies (EAST) contract of our Information Technology (IT) Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P). The NEACC's role is to help NASA improve business processes and to deploy enabling technology needed to implement our Agency's strategic plan."

Think for a moment: Remember all of the things in "Avatar", "Star Trek", and other SciFi films that were controlled by people waving their hands over sexy looking devices, wandering around holodecks, or using remotely controlled bodies. When Kinect was first released, Microsoft was against anyone hacking it. A similar thing happened when LEGO Mindstorms was released and hobbyists began to fiddle with the software. As was the case with LEGO, Microsoft has done a complete 180 and has overtly embraced the notion that people can take technology and do things that its originators never imagined. How could Kinect hacks change the way that NASA does things? What would it be like to use Kinect as a whole body interface with 360 degrees of movement while living in microgravity aboard the ISS? Could NASA control Robonaut this way?

Announcing the data.nasa.gov API, open.NASA

"We're excited today to announce the launch of our Data API for data.nasa.gov, the collaborative online database of NASA datasets we launched in August. The data.nasa.gov API allows a machine-readable interface to return metadata from the site organized by category, tag, date, or search term. We're hoping this allows new and creative visualizations of the data resources NASA provides to the public. Additionally, it is a learning experience for us as we work to expand transparency, participation, and collaboration at NASA through new uses of technology. You can view documentation on the API directly on data.nasa.gov. As this (like all of our project) is a continual work-in-progress, we would love your feedback on the tool and your ideas on how you would improve access to NASA's public data."

Be like Steve Jobs. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

"Steve Jobs was 6 months older than me. I am certainly not done with life. Given his tectonic impact, he was clearly not ready either - even if he had faced his fate."

Keith's note: The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has recently release a large number of standards designed to structure the creation of a "vrtual observatory" that spans efforts by many individuals and organzations across the world. According to their website: "The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) was formed in June 2002 with a mission to "facilitate the international coordination and collaboration necessary for the development and deployment of the tools, systems and organizational structures necessary to enable the international utilization of astronomical archives as an integrated and interoperating virtual observatory." The IVOA now comprises 19 VO programs from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States and inter-governmental organizations (ESA and ESO). Membership is open to other national and international programs according to the IVOA Guidelines for Participation."

A large number of updated standards were posted today at astro-ph (listed below):

NASA Announces International Space Apps Competition

"NASA is announcing the International Space Apps Competition to support the Open Government Partnership (OGP), which President Barack Obama announced Tuesday. The challenge will culminate with a two-day event next year that will provide an opportunity for government to use the expertise and entrepreneurial spirit of citizen explorers to help address global challenges. During the event, NASA representatives and officials from international space agencies will gather with scientists and citizens to use publicly-released scientific data to create solutions for issues, such as weather impact on the global economy and depletion of ocean resources."

To support upcoming robotic and human exploration needs, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) anticipates that it and others will need to implement a unified architecture for internetworked communication and navigation services that span the solar system. Unlike the terrestrial internet, a future Solar System Internet (SSI) must be capable of accommodating intermittent connectivity, long or variable delays, asymmetric data rates, and high data loss rates. The underlying capability that enables the SSI is commonly referred to as "Disruption-Tolerant Networking" (DTN). The SSI will employ both opportunistic and scheduled communications paths to optimize routing among nodes of the SSI, while maintaining low communications overhead and data processing load.

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Currently, NASA has several ways the public can learn about ISS sighting opportunities, including NASA Sky Watch. However, NASA's websites do not disseminate this information to the public- the public must seek it out proactively instead.

NASA seeks to increase public awareness of the ISS, its visibility, and mission by making ISS sighting information, including personalized notifications, readily available to the general public in an easily accessible and understandable way. To that end, NASA seeks to collaborate with a domestic entity, on an unfunded basis, to support an ISS sighting notification tool.

Specifically, NASA seeks submissions for developing and releasing a tool to notify users from the general public, via email or Short Messenger Service (SMS) texts, when the ISS will pass overhead (i.e., when an ISS "sighting" will occur in the user's vicinity). Possible features include options (configured via a website) to: obtain location from IP geolocation, smartphone device geolocation, or user-entered location; specify time periods for notification (i.e., evening or morning passes only); specify minimum elevation (higher elevations are necessary to be seen by city dwellers); and specify minimum pass duration. Other features may involve depiction of ISS data integrated into existing presentation frameworks (e.g., attitude dependent skymaps on smartphones).

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AO Number (Required in subject line of email application): 799. Desired Number of Participants: 1 Background Information: The Deep Space Network tracks over forty spacecraft from three geographically separate sites in Goldstone California, Canberra, Australia and Madrid, Spain.

NASA and Harvard University have established the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL), which will enable software developers to compete with each other to create the best computer code for NASA systems. The NTL provides an online virtual facility for NASA researchers with a computational or complex data processing challenge to "order" a solution, just like they would order laboratory tests or supplies.

Software developers will compete with each other to create a winning solution, as measured by internal code quality, performance against benchmarks, and the ability to be integrated into NASA systems. The competition will provide the researchers with a finished software solution at a lower cost than if they hired an individual developer or team.

"NASA is at the forefront of this cutting edge approach," said Jason Crusan, chief technologist for space operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "We want to advance knowledge of how to manage these tournaments and gain solutions to technical mission requirements with real world results for operational and future programs."

This approach, often termed "crowd sourcing" or "broadcast search," lessens the effects of uncertainty in software development by searching for a problem's solution through multiple, parallel paths. Instead of relying on one individual or team, the researcher can access many, independent ideas, which increases the chances of a successful solution.

Teams to Design Software for Small Satellites on the International Space Station

WASHINGTON -- NASA is challenging high school teams to design software to program small satellites aboard the International Space Station. The competition centers on the Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES.

SPHERES are bowling ball-sized spherical satellites used to test maneuvers for spacecraft performing autonomous rendezvous and docking. Three of these satellites fly inside the station's cabin. Each is self-contained with power, propulsion, computing and navigation equipment.

The Zero-Robotics investigation, run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., is designed to inspire future scientists and engineers. The teams are asked to address challenges of satellite docking, assembly and flight formation. The 2010 Zero-Robotics Challenge expands on a limited pilot program performed in fall 2009. This expanded pilot, called HelioSPHERES, will involve high schools from across the country during the 2010 - 2011 academic year. This new education program builds critical engineering skills for students, such as problem solving, design thought process, operations training, teamwork and presentation skills.

ESA Highlights Online Games as Key Future Technology

"Video gaming has become one of the globe's most popular pastimes. Fans say games are often educational, their detractors answer they are anything but. Might ESA have something to learn from gaming? A new Agency study says the answer is yes. It comes from ESA's Technology Observatory, which is tasked with scanning non-space sectors to look for developments with potential for spin-in or joint research. The study, Online Game Technology for Space Education and System Analysis, looks at potential applications of different online game-playing technologies from the simplest content-oriented games through to Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) virtual worlds."

In line with the Obama administration's efforts to establish an open and transparent government, one of Nebula's goals is to create a secure gateway through which NASA can share select data sets with outside researchers and the American public while at the same time, limit access to it's highly-secured internal networks.

One of the projects Nebula has been very excited to support enables the public to view and explore the surfaces of the Moon and Mars in unprecedented resolution in both Google Earth and Microsoft World Wide Telescope. The NASA team responsible for these projects leveraged Nebula to perform sophisticated large-scale image processing and hosting of hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images and over 100 terabytes of data. This project involved sophisticated 3D image modeling using 2D image tiles, enabling the public to explore the surfaces of these celestial bodies in realistic, 3D worlds.

NASA ISS On-Orbit Status 5 October 2009

"Gennady reconfigured an A31p laptop (#1157) by equipping it with the HDD (Hard Disk Drive) of the Russian RS1 laptop (#1145), supported by ground specialist tagup."

NASA ISS On-Orbit Status 4 October 2009

"Maxim Suraev performed the periodic update of the AntiVirus program in the Russian VKS auxiliary laptops (RSS2, RSK1, RSE1, RSE2) from a new uplinked program copy on the RSS1 laptop, first scanning the latter, then transferring the database by flash-card to the other computers and scanning them one by one."

NASA ISS On-Orbit Status 2 October 2009

"CDR Padalka took Guy Laliberte on a one-hour orientation/briefing tour of the ISS, setting him up for his nine-day stay on board. Preparations included installing the SFP’s HDD (Hard Disk Drive) in the RSK2 laptop for his use. [Guy’s introduction covered SM windows 7 & 8 for Earth photo/video ops, NIKON D3X & SONY Z7 camera stowage locations & use, location for Guy’s daily VHF1 conferences, the SFP-PCG & SFP-ICG experiment container setup, etc.]"