Best Practices for a Future Open Code Policy for NASA Space Science

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Modern science is ever more driven by computations and simulations. In particular, the state of the art in space and Earth science often arises from complex simulations of climate, space weather, and astronomical phenomena. At the same time, scientific work requires data processing, presentation, and analysis through broadly available proprietary and community software.1 Implicitly or explicitly, software is central to science. Scientific discovery, understanding, validation, and interpretation are all enhanced by access to the source code of the software used by scientists.

This report investigates and recommends options for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD) as it considers how to establish a policy regarding open source software to complement its existing policy on open data. In particular, the report reviews existing data and software policies and the lessons learned from the implementation of those policies, summarizes community perspectives, and presents policy options and recommendations for implementing an open source software policy for NASA SMD.

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108 pages · 8.5 x 11 · paperback
ISBN Paperback: 0-309-48271-2
ISBN Ebook: 0-309-48272-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17226/25217

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National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Open Source Software Policy Options for NASA Earth and Space Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

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Chelle L. Gentemann

CHELLE L. GENTEMANN is a senior scientist at Earth and Space Research where she works on air-sea interactions, upper ocean dynamics, and passive microwave sea surface temperatures. Prior to that she was with Remote Sensing Systems where she focused on air-sea interactions, diurnal warming, passive-microwave SST retrievals, instrument calibration, and radio frequency interference. Dr. Gentemann participates in a number of science teams and committees, including the Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperatures (GHRSST). She has been the principal investigator for the U.S. component of GHRSST, the Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature project, since 2003. She was awarded the National Oceanographic Partnership Program’s Excellence in Partnering Award and the American Geophysical Union’s Charles S. Falkenberg Award. She received her Ph.D. in meteorology and physical oceanography from the University of Miami. Dr. Gentemann has served on several National Academies committees including the Committee on Earth Science and Applications from Space, and the Committee on a Framework for Analyzing the Needs for Continuity of NASA-Sustained Remote Sensing Observations of the Earth from Space.

Mark A. Parsons

MARK A. PARSONS is a senior research scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He is also director of data science operations for the Tetherless World Constellation at RPI. Previously he was Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance and an associate director of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Applications. Prior to that, he was lead project manager at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has been involved in data management for more than 20 years, during which he defined and implemented comprehensive data management processes for many projects and organizations. He is active in multiple international informatics efforts and led the data management effort for the International Polar Year (IPY). Mr. Parsons is a member of the Foundation for Earth Science Information Partners Board of Directors and a member of the Coordinating Committee for the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. He received the American Geophysical Union/Earth Science Information Partners Charles S. Falkenberg Award. He earned his M.A. in geography at University of Colorado Boulder. Mr. Parsons has served on the Committee on the Development of a Strategic Vision and Implementation Plan for the U.S. Antarctic Program, as an ex officio member of the Board on Research Data and Information, and a member of the Committee on Archiving and Accessing Environmental and Geospatial Data at NOAA.

Lorena A. Barba

LORENA A. BARBA is an associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The George Washington University in Washington, DC. Her research interests include computational fluid dynamics, high-performance computing, computational biophysics, and animal flight. She was an early adopter of GPU technology for scientific computing, and was recognized by Nvidia as a CUDA Fellow in 2012. She has advocated for open-source software for science and open educational resources for years, and her research group is well known for its open-science practices. Barba is a member of the board of directors for NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that supports and promotes world-class, innovative, open-source scientific computing. She is a member of the editorial board for IEEE/AIP Computing in Science and Engineering (leading a new track on Reproducible Research), The Journal of Open Source Software (founding member), and The ReScience Journal. Dr. Barba received the NSF Faculty Early CAREER award, was named CUDA Fellow by NVIDIA Corporation. She is an awardee of the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) First Grant program; is an Amelia Earhart Fellow of the Zonta Foundation; and she was awarded a Leamer-Rosenthal Prize by the Berkeley Institute for Transparency in the Social Science (BITSS) in the Leaders in Education category. Dr. Barba earned her Ph.D. in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. She has no prior Academies service.

Kelle Cruz

KELLE L. CRUZ is an associate professor at the City University of New York Hunter College in the department of physics and astronomy. She is also research associate in the Astrophysics Department at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research interests include the study of low mass stars and brown dwarfs using optical and near infrared spectroscopy. She is a member of the coordinating committee of the Astropy Project and is also the founder and editor of the AstroBetter Blog and Wiki. Previously, Dr. Cruz was a National Science Foundation Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Museum of Natural History and a Spitzer Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. She is currently a councilor/trustee of the American Astronomical Society and served previously as the chair of the Employment Committee. She earned her Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania. She has no prior Academies’ service.

Brenda J. Dietrich

BRENDA J. DIETRICH (NAE) is an IBM Fellow and vice president at IBM Business Solutions. As a fellow, author, inventor, and leader in analytics and data science, she applies data and computation to processes throughout IBM and IBM clients. She led the mathematical sciences department in IBM Research for over a decade. She was IBM’s CTO for Business Analytics, led emerging technologies in Watson, established Data Science for Insight Cloud Services, and is currently leading data science activities in The Weather Company, a newly acquired IBM Business. Dr. Dietrich’s research interests include mathematical models of decision processes, particularly those related to the allocation of resources; use of data and computation in decision making, both in enterprise processes and in individual choices; use of computational methods such as visualization, statistics, data mining, simulation, and optimization to generate and evaluate decisions; extraction of models that describe the operation of systems, both physical and behavioral, from data, especially data generated by automation of business processes and computer intermediation of social processes; cognitive computing and extending the base capability of natural language processing and search based methods to include structured data analysis and interpretation. Dr. Dietrich received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.S. and Ph.D. in operations research from Cornell University. She has served on the Academies’ Industrial, Manufacturing and Operational Systems Engineering Peer Committee, the 2019 Nominating Committee, and the Panel on Assessment and Analysis at the Army Research Laboratory.

Christopher L. Fryer

CHRISTOPHER L. FRYER is a Scientist 5 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the computer science, computational science and statistics division. At LANL, he is the director of the Center for Theoretical Astrophysics and the project lead of the high energy density physics impact team. Dr. Fryer's research includes a broad range of astrophysical transients (supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, etc.); neutron star and black hole systems; and nucleosynthesis. He also works on laboratory physics experiments at the national laboratories and has worked extensively on code development and support. At LANL, he is on the advisory committee for the Center of Non-Linear Studies, the Center for Space and Earth Science and the Information Science and Technology Institute. He also is on LANL's Nuclear Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology Senior Review Team and the Board for Institutional Computing. For his work on multi-dimensional simulations of core-collapse supernovae, he was named an APS fellow, and for this work, combined with his laboratory physics work, he received the E.O. Lawrence Award and was named a LANL Fellow. Dr. Fryer earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona. He has no prior Academies service.

Joe Giacalone

JOE GIACALONE is a professor of planetary sciences at the University of Arizona in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. His research focus is on the origin and physical processes involved in creating high-energy charged particles from near the Sun, throughout the heliosphere, and beyond, and how these high-energy particles move throughout the solar system. He has been directly involved with number of NASA spacecraft missions, including Ulysses, ACE, and Voyager, and is currently a co-investigator for the upcoming Parker Solar Probe mission. He uses a wide array of theoretical and computer modeling techniques in his research including cosmic-ray transport, particle-in-cell kinetic, and magneto-hydrodynamic fluid simulations. Previously he was a senior research associate at the University of Arizona, and a postdoctoral research associate at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, and the Professor Leon and Pauline Blitzer Award for Excellence in Teaching of Physics and Related Science at the University of Arizona. He earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Kansas. He has served on the Academies’ Panel on Physics and on the Panel on Solar and Heliospheric Physics.

Sara J. Graves

SARA J. GRAVES is the director of the Information Technology and Systems Center, Board of Trustees University Professor and professor of computer science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She directs research and development in sustainable distributed data infrastructures, data mining and knowledge discovery, semantic technologies, information analytics, and cyber security/resilience. Dr. Graves is a member of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (GCOOS) Board of Directors, part of the Integrated Ocean Observing System; GCOOS seeks to facilitate the establishment of a sustained and integrated observing systems for the Gulf of Mexico. Dr. Graves is currently a member of the Southeastern Universities Research Association Board of Trustees and was a founding member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Science Advisory Board Data Archives and Access Requirements Working Group and the Climate Change Science Institute Science Advisory Board of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She has also served as a member of the NASA Headquarters Earth System Science and Applications Advisory Committee (ESSAAC) and chair of the ESSAAC Subcommittee on Information Systems and Services. Dr. Graves has been the principal investigator on many research projects with NASA, NOAA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), DOE, and the Department of Defense. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She has served on the Gulf Research Program Advisory Board and the Board on Research Data and Information.

Joseph Harrington

JOSEPH HARRINGTON is a professor of planetary science in the Department of Physics at the University of Central Florida. Dr. Harrington co-founded the physics Ph.D. track in planetary sciences and is leading its transition into an independent Ph.D. program. Dr. Harrington leads the Spitzer Exoplanet Target of Opportunity Program, an international collaboration of planet hunters and specialists in low-signal data analysis. The group has used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make the first measurements of dozens of exoplanetary atmospheres, including numerous high-impact results, by developing state-of-the-art methods for removing systematics from Spitzer data. As part of this effort, Harrington led teams that developed several open-source scientific codes, including Bayesian Atmospheric Radiative Transfer (BART), which retrieves atmospheric parameters from exoplanetary eclipse and transit data. He wrote the Reproducible Research Software License to prompt a discussion on the robustness of research results involving complex computer codes in astrophysics and beyond. He is the lead organizer of the ExoClimes workshop series and founded the NumPy Documentation Project, which crowd-sourced the documentation of a nascent, now popular, open-source numerical programming package. Prior work includes study of cometary impacts into giant planets, the detection of atmospheric waves in Jupiter's atmosphere, and stellar occultations by Saturn's atmosphere and rings. Previously, Dr. Harrington was a researcher at Cornell University and a National Research Council fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He earned his Ph.D. in planetary science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has no prior Academies’ service.

Elva J. Jones

ELVA J. JONES is a professor and Chairperson of Computer Science of the Department of Computer Science at Winston-Salem State University. Dr. Jones engaged in study of space science information systems, and assistive robotics, computer science education and assessment methods. Her research interests include artificial intelligence, robotics, computer science education, assessment, game development, gamification, information retrieval, and systems design for decision support. She is the recipient of the Fifty Most Important African Americans in Technology award; the Information Technology Senior Management Forum Ivory Dome Education Leadership Award; Scott Cares Foundation Humanitarian Award for Achievements in Technology award; Phi Beta Sigma Outstanding Educator Award; WSSU Sponsored Programs “Million Dollar” Award; City of Winston-Salem Outstanding Women Leaders Award; NASA University Joint Venture (JOVE) Research Award; NASA JOVE Curriculum Development Award; and the NASA JOVE Fellow at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She is a member of the North Carolina Space Grant Executive Committee and previously served as a Commissioner for the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). She is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery. Dr. Jones earned her Ph. D. in industrial and systems engineering with a focus in computer studies at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina. She has no prior Academies service.

Maria M. Kuznetsova

MARIA M. KUZNETSOVA is an astrophysicist in the Space Weather Laboratory and the director of the Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research interests include global MHD modeling of magnetosphere dynamics and implementation of kinetic effects in MHD models. While with CCMC, she has helped to develop an “Open Model Policy,” enabling researchers outside of the immediate modeling community to have access to modern space science simulations and establishing the CCMC as a leading repository and service center for space weather modeling. Dr. Kuznetsova previously held positions with the Russian Space Research Institute (IKI) and the Raytheon Company, and she currently serves as the chair of the COSPAR Panel on Space Weather and as a liaison to multiple NASA and NSF steering committees. She is a recipient of the NASA Robert H. Goddard Exceptional Achievement Award. Dr. Kuznetsova earned her Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics from the Space Research Institute in Moscow, Russia. She has no prior Academies service.

Clifford A. Lynch

CLIFFORD A. LYNCH is the executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). He is also an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch served in the University of California Office of the President, and as director of Library Automation. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the intelligent uses of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual life. CNI’s wide-ranging agenda includes work in digital preservation, data intensive scholarship, teaching, learning and technology, and infrastructure and standards development. Dr. Lynch is both a past president and recipient of the Award of Merit for the American Society for Information Science, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. Dr. Lynch earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He has served as co-chair of the Board on Research Data and Information, co-chair of the Committee on Planning a Global Library of Mathematical Sciences, and as a member of the Planning Committee for a Workshop on Overcoming the Technical and Policy Constraints that Limit Large-Scale Data Integration.

Melissa A. McGrath

MELISSA A. MCGRATH is a senior scientist at the SETI Institute. Her research expertise includes planetary and satellites atmospheres and magnetospheres, particularly imaging and spectroscopic studies of Jupiter’s Galilean satellites. She is currently a co-investigator on the Ultraviolet Spectrometer instrument on the ESA JUICE mission to Ganymede, as well as a co-investigator on two proposed instruments for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. Previously, Dr. McGrath served as chief scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Dr. McGrath has served as the chair of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences; as president of the International Astronomical Union’s Commission 16 (Physical Studies of Planets and Satellites); and she is currently a scientific editor for both The Astronomical Journal and the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Dr. McGrath has been awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal; the NASA Superior Accomplishment Award; and the NASA Ames Honor Award in Lunar Science. Dr. McGrath earned her Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Virginia. She has no prior Academies’ service.

Aaron Ridley

AARON RIDLEY is a professor at the University of Michigan (UM) in the Department of Climate and Space Science and Engineering. He previously served as a research scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. His research interests include modeling of the near-Earth space environment, ground-based instrumentation, and small satellites. Dr. Ridley currently has an active program for Fabry-Perot Interferometers in North America. He has been principle investigator of three CubeSats, including CADRE and two CubeSats for the European QB50 mission, each of which will measure the state of the upper atmosphere. Dr. Ridley has received the UM’s College of Engineering Monroe-Brown Foundation Education Excellence Award, the NASA Group Achievement Award, the UM’s College of Engineering Outstanding Research Scientist Award, and the Most Cited Paper, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Research. He earned a B.S. from Eastern Michigan University, and a M.S. and Ph.D. in atmospheric and space science from the University of Michigan. He has served on the Academies’ Committee on Solar and Space Physics and the Committee on Assessment of the National Science Foundation's 2015 Geospace Portfolio Review.

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Best Practices for a Future Open Code Policy for NASA Space Science

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Best Practices for a Future Open Code Policy for NASA Space Science

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Featured publication

Open Source Software Policy Options for NASA Earth and Space Sciences

Description

Collaborators

Committee

Sponsors

Staff

Major units and sub-units

Contact

Provide feedback

Request materials

More like this

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Health Care Financing to Improve Availability of Affordable Contraception: Identifying Promising Practices

Review of Methods in the Report on Carcinogens Handbook

Transit Cooperative Research Program

National Cooperative Highway Research Program

Modernizing Mathematics Education for Grades 9-14

Aeronautics, Space, and Astronomy Program Area

21st Century Tools at the Interface of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) Science and Quantum Information Science (QIS): Report Series--Committee on Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Sciences

Frontiers of Metastable Materials Development Using Artificial Intelligence: A Workshop