NASA to release source code self-developed software

In the coming months, NASA will release source code for more than a thousand software projects in a ‘GitHub for astronauts’. The code covers projects ranging from robotics to software for performing climate simulations.

In total, NASA would like to make the source code of more than a thousand projects searchable via a database that has been worked on in recent months, Wired reports. The US space agency has written thousands of programs for numerous projects. Because NASA is a government agency, the code is not copyrighted.

NASA will publish a list of all projects it plans to release as open source next Thursday next Thursday. In 2015 this should eventually lead to a GitHub-like database in which code has been made searchable. In principle, all software code should be freely retrievable, although there are exceptions for a number of projects. For example, there are restrictions on the software written for the guidance system of rocket engines.

Software developed by NASA has in some cases already been used by third parties. For example, algorithms originally written for star recognition by the Hubble Space Telescope have been used by biologists to track fish species. In 2009, to celebrate 40 years of Apollo 11, NASA published the source code of the lunar lander’s guidance systems.