NASA just launched code.nasa.gov, a web platform where code-literate space enthusiasts can collaborate with NASA geeks.
Currently, the site is in its early alpha stages featuring a guide to getting involved and a list touting sexy project names like “International Polar Orbiter Processing Package,” “Lossless Hyper-/multi-spectral data compression software,” and “Lunar Mapper v1.” The site will later include a forum that NASA hopes will become a “highly visible community hub that will imbue open concepts into the formulation stages of new hardware and software projects.”
The project arrives just as all kinds of amateurs are getting excited about coding, thanks to Code Academy, a free online course in programming that looks like Foursquare-meets-Math Blaster (the new Code Year course asks that each student spend about an hour a day for a year learning JavaScript, which may be a small price to pay for the great sums that will come to you as a master hacker).
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NASA meanwhile has been busy burnishing its ‘hacker’ credentials with all sorts of open source programs. The code project is an effort to centralize already existing efforts to get netizens involved in software writing, part of its Open Government initiative. In the past year, NASA has already released 16 software packages under the open source license.
The goal, of course, is to grow general public awareness about space exploration during a time when funds are fleeting and Space Shuttles are being packed up and shipped to museums. Thirty-two astronauts are on Twitter, and the agency has turned every last satellite and robot launch into an opportunity for a Tweetup. Their scientists are distributing their data on a cloud-computing platform called ‘Nebula.’
But the project may also serve another of the space agency’s unstated missions: making people smarter. It won’t send you to space, but the prospects of helping science better understand how the solar system works might be enough to motivate you to learn more about how your computer system works.
Code.nasa.gov is not the only open-source forum for coders wanting to comb the cosmos. Jill Tarter of UC Berkeley’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute set up setiQuest (http://setiquest.org/) after winning the $100,000 TED prize in 2009. But while NASA wants your help in building the machinery that will take its astronauts to distant worlds, setiQuest tries to unleash the scientist in you: the site offers raw data gathered by the university’s Allen Telescope Array and allows citizen scientists to comb through it for traces of extraterrestrial life.
