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Henry, Andrew

Publications and source records attributed to Henry, Andrew.

2 records
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2018

Open Source Lessons Learned with Open MCT

Open source enables flexible use, and reduces or eliminates the proprietary nature of software that can impede collaboration. While still in the early stages, we have built a community of users and contributors, with participation inside and outside of the space community. The model for collaboration is to empower missions by enabling them to adopt the software as their own, make modifications and contributions, and see those contributions used in a larger space community. All missions benefit from the larger user base enabled by open source, as each critical eye on the software results in improvements. The Open MCT user base ranges from missions, to industry outside the space industry, to research and student projects.

Trimble, Jay↗
NASA NTRS2018

Building a Community of Open Source Contributors

In 2014, a software development team from NASA's Ames Research Center (ARC), working in collaboration with mission teams at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), set out to build a new software system for data visualization for missions. Our functional goal was to build a modular multi-mission software system that empowered users to build and compose their own visualizations of data across mission domains, with no programming required from the users to assemble these displays. Beyond the basic functional requirements for missions, we specified a requirement to make the software open source. This requirement was included to enable flexible use, and reduce or eliminate the proprietary nature of software that can impede collaboration. By making it open source, we also benefit from increased productivity and draw on the innovation of the open source developer community. We want to build and empower a community of contributors and enable broad use both inside and outside the space community to glean insights from cross domain usage. The open source software is called Open Mission Control Technologies, it is available on GitHub (https://github.com/nasa/openmct).

Open Source↗