NASA has announced a significant investment in open-source software, allocating $15.6 million in grant funding to support 15 projects. This initiative aims to maintain and develop open-source tools, frameworks, and libraries crucial for the NASA science community.
The grants are part of NASA's Open-Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries awards program. This effort supports sustainable development of software essential for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate goals. "We received almost twice the number of proposals this year than we had in the previous call," stated Steve Crawford, program executive at NASA Headquarters. He emphasized the importance of these projects to NASA's missions and data infrastructure.
Thomas Caswell, a computational scientist at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), received a five-year $1.6 million grant for Matplotlib and Cartopy development. Matplotlib is widely used for creating various data visualizations and is employed at NSLS-II, among other DOE facilities.
The awarded projects include foundational awards for long-term cooperative agreements impacting multiple divisions within NASA's Science Mission Directorate. These include initiatives by Ames Research Center on stereo pipeline maintenance and Caltech's enhancement of Astroquery infrastructure.
Sustainment awards focus on three-year grants or agreements supporting tools with significant impact in one or more divisions. Notable recipients include NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory working on river software sustainability and Pennsylvania State University developing simulation infrastructure for astrophysics.
This funding opportunity is supported by NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer through Research Opportunities for Space and Earth Science programs.
For further details on Brookhaven’s involvement in this research, Denise Yazak can be contacted via email at dyazak@bnl.gov or phone at 631-344-6371.