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#5. NASA FOSS
Here are this week's 3 links worth exploring:
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Running the world's largest space program means a lot of software developers creating a lot of code! NASA uses multiple public repositories on sites like GitHub to host its Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) and welcome community participation. Code for autonomous robots, wrangling enormous amounts of data, image processing, simulating extraterrestrial environments. More than 500+ projects can be found in this searchable NASA catalog: https://code.nasa.gov/
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From their experience in surface reconstruction for planetary exploration and computer vision techniques for autonomous vehicles, the NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline is a FOSS suite of automated geodesy and photogrammetry tools. Used to process planetary imagery captured from orbiting and surface robotic explorers on other planets. Capable of modelling terrain for NASA spacecraft and Earth-orbiting satellites: https://github.com/NeoGeographyToolkit/StereoPipeline
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NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter uses a combination of custom-made and off-the-shelf hardware components - many taken from the world of smartphone technology - and flight control courtesy of F Prime. Its a FOSS flight software C++ framework initially created by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Designed for CubeSats, small spacecraft, and flight instruments with a focus on reusable code for a range of processors: https://nasa.github.io/fprime/
Quote of the Week: "We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable: the best site is 'somewhere else entirely'." — Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier
Onward!
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