NASA and open-source software

From the moon landing to the James Webb Space Telescope and many other scientific missions, software is critical for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Sharing information has also been in the DNA of the space agency from the beginning. As a result, NASA also contributes to and releases open-source software and open data. In a keynote at FOSDEM 2023, Science Data Officer Steve Crawford talked about NASA and open-source software, including the challenges NASA has faced in using open source and the agency's recent initiatives to lower barriers.

Software has always been a big part of NASA's work. Who hasn't seen the photo of computer scientist Margaret Hamilton next to a hard-copy stack of the Apollo software she and her team at MIT produced? The stack of code is as tall as she is. In 2016, the original Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code for the command and lunar modules was published on GitHub in the public domain. You can even compile the code and run it in a simulator.

Sharing its discoveries has also always been a part of NASA's heritage, Crawford emphasized. He showed section 203(a) of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which created NASA. It states that the agency shall "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof".

From open development to spin-offs

In recent years, more and more of this sharing was also in the form of releasing software. For instance, when NASA's drone copter Ingenuity made it first flight on Mars in 2021 as part of the Perseverance mission, it used an open-source flight-control framework, F Prime. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) released the framework in 2017 under the Apache 2.0 license. One of the example deployments even runs on the Raspberry Pi. But the NASA mission also used a lot of open-source dependencies. To celebrate Ingenuity's first flight, GitHub recognized the more than 12,000 people who contributed to these dependencies with a badge on their profile.

Another high-profile mission that Crawford talked about is the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December 2021. It's a collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. Its calibration software is developed openly on GitHub, enabling scientists to test their projects. The software library is developed in Python and makes use of Astropy, which handles common astronomy tasks, such as converting between different coordinate systems and reading and writing files with astronomical data. NASA not only uses open-source projects in F Prime and the James Webb Space Telescope's calibration software, but in a lot of other projects too. Some of those projects can be seen in Crawford's slide above.

Crawford listed a lot of other open-source software NASA has released in its long history, calling it "just a small sampling". He also noted that some of these projects became spin-offs. For instance, in 2008 NASA started a project called Project Nebula to standardize its web sites. It then evolved into something that was addressing more general needs. This caused NASA to join forces with Rackspace to create the open-source cloud-computing infrastructure project OpenStack, which is currently managed by the non-profit OpenStack Foundation.

Astronomical challenges

While the previous examples may be some high-profile successes, open source at NASA doesn't come without its challenges. "Civil servants can't release anything copyrightable", Crawford said, referring to the fact that under US copyright law, a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties is in the public domain.

Of course NASA has contributed to many open-source projects, but according to Crawford people often do this "not in their official capacity as NASA employees". In 2003 NASA created a license to enable the release of software by civil servants, the NASA Open Source Agreement. This license has been approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but the Free Software Foundation doesn't consider it a free-software license because it does not allow changes to the code that come from third-party free-software projects. "It isn't widely used in the community and complicates the reuse of NASA software with this license", Crawford said.

Another challenge is NASA's famous bureaucracy, Crawford admitted: "NASA does not always engage well with the open-source community." As an example, he showed how curl's main developer Daniel Stenberg received an email from NASA's Commercial IT Acquisition Team, asking him to supply country of origin information for curl, as well as a list of all "authorized resellers". Stenberg noted the keynote (which he barely missed attending) in a recent blog post.

Lowering barriers for open-source software

There are some initiatives brewing at NASA that should make these challenges a thing of the past, though. In his talk, Crawford presented NASA's Open-Source Science Initiative (OSSI). Its goal is to support scientists to help them integrate open-science principles into the entire research workflow. Just a few weeks before Crawford's talk, NASA's Science Mission Directorate published its new policy on scientific information.

Crawford summarized this policy with "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary, always secure", and he made this more concrete: "Publications should be made openly available with no embargo period, including research data and software. Data should be released with a Creative Commons Zero license, and software with a commonly used permissive license, such as Apache, BSD, or MIT. The new policy also encourages using and contributing to open-source software." Crawford added that NASA's policies will be updated to make it clear that employees can contribute to open-source projects in their official capacity.

This new policy should lower the barriers between open-source software and NASA. Funding for external open-source projects has already improved: in 2021-2022 NASA selected 16 proposals to support 22 different open-source projects financially. This included the Python projects NumPy (used by Astropy), pandas, and scikit-learn, as well as the Julia programming language.

As part of its Open-Source Science Initiative, NASA has started its five-year Transform to Open Science (TOPS) mission. This is a $40-million mission to speed up adoption of open-science practices; it starts with the White House and all major US federal agencies, including NASA, declaring 2023 as the "Year of Open Science". One of NASA's strategic goals with TOPS is to enable five major scientific discoveries through open-science principles, Crawford said.

Keep contributing

Open-source software will clearly play an important role in open science, and was already instrumental in various breakthrough discoveries. When scientists created the first image of a black hole in 2019 from data generated by the Event Horizon Telescope, Dr. Katie Bouman who led the development of the imaging algorithm was explicit about it: "We're deeply grateful to all the open source contributors who made our work possible." This was also the message Crawford ended his talk with: "Keep contributing, building, and sustaining your code." After his "Thank you for your contributions", his words were followed by big applause from a room full of open-source developers.