Imagine your software contribution helping in the smooth operation of a space shuttle. It’s not a dream…….it’s a reality.
NASA has plenty of open source softwares where the open source community can contribute and make a difference.
Few excerpts from NASA open source project website.
” NASA conducts research and development in software and software technology as an essential response to the needs of NASA missions. Under the NASA Software Release policy, NASA has several options for the release of NASA developed software technologies. These options now include Open Source software release. This option is under the NASA Open Source Agreement “NOSA”. “
The motivations for NASA to distribute software codes Open Source are:
1. To increase NASA software quality via community peer review
2. To accelerate software development via community contributions to maximize the awareness and impact of NASA research
3. To increase dissemination of NASA software in support of NASA’s education
I found the World Wind project to be of lot of interest to the end user. It allows any user to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth, leveraging high resolution LandSat imagery and SRTM elevation data to experience Earth in visually rich 3D, just as if they were really there. Quite similar to Google earth.
Links::
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/nasa1.3.php
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/agreement.jsp?id=22
http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/project.jsp?id=9
https://lists.nasa.gov/