NASA's 2004 Software of the Year

NASA Tech Briefs, Oct 2004

The 2004 NASA Software of the Year was awarded to two co-winners: a data visualization and simulation software package used by Mars rover missions, and an updated version of a fluid dynamics and aerodynamics analysis suite. The Science Activity Planner from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and TetrUSS 2004 from Langley Research Center both have extensive applications within NASA, government and military agencies, education, and commercial industry.

Science Activity Planner (SAP)

Jeffrey S. Norris, Mark W. Powell, Marselie A. Vona, Paul G. Backes, and Justin V. Wick Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

The Science Activity Planner combines cutting-edge visualization with planning and simulation capabilities to provide an intuitive interface to Mars rovers and landers. The multi-mission, multi-purpose software has achieved three simultaneous successes in mission operations, public outreach, and technology development.

SAP is available in two versions: the first is used in mission operations and contains the official mission activity dictionary; the second version was released under the name Maestro to the public for education and outreach. Maestro also includes additional training features that make it an effective public engagement tool.

SAP is heavily used in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission on a daily basis. Scientists on the MER mission depend on SAP as their primary interface to the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. In fact, SAP was designed primarily with the mission's science team in mind.

Within MER, SAP is the first tool used in the daily tactical uplink process. Mission scientists and engineers use SAP to plan the next actions of the rovers, and to visualize, analyze, and manipulate the data arriving from Mars. The science team then uses it to collaboratively construct the activities they want the rovers to execute on the next Martian day. The team is able to complete this step quickly by dividing into small groups that operate SAP in parallel.

The software has completed more than 350 Mars days of successful mission operations of the rovers without a single critical failure, and will continue to serve this role until the end of the mission.

SAP is also the centerpiece of a major public engagement effort for the MER mission. The Maestro version of the software was released to the public and provides an exciting, hands-on experience. More than 300,000 downloads of Maestro were made in the first month of its release (Downloads can be made at http://mars. telascience.org).

An advantage to SAP is its ease of use. It contains common graphical user interface paradigms from popular applications such as Web browsers, visual input validation, and lookahead simulation. It is written entirely in Java, which allows it to run on all major operating systems - from dedicated workstations in mission operations, to standard home platforms.

In addition to its uses on the MER mission, SAP has been chosen as part of the operations systems for the upcoming Phoenix and Mars Science Laboratory missions. Its increasing commercial value comes from the education industry, and its use as the premier robot operations platform for the global robotics research field. It is used in schools, universities, and museums, and by commercial customers such as Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, and hundreds of commercial research labs.

Tetrahedral Unstructured Software System (TetrUSS 2004)

Khaled S. Abdol-Hamul, Need T. Fnnh, Cmig A. Hunter, Pansh C. Parilih, Shahyar Z. Pizadeh, andJamshidA. Samareh

Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA

Along with Maharaj K. Bhat of EITI, Mohagna J. Pandya of Swales Aerospace, and Matthew J. Grismer of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, the NASA Langley team developed TetrUSS 2004, the latest version of the software suite for fluid dynamics and aerodynamics analysis. Originally developed in 1991 for NASA internal applications, TetrUSS has evolved into an efficient computer fluid dynamics tool used by engineers and scientists across the US, as well as by other government agencies, academia, and industries such as automotive, biomedical, and civil engineering.

The TetrUSS suite won the NASA Software of the Year Award in 1996, but was honored again this year for the new version, which includes developments made over the past eight years. These include the ability to port TetrUSS to other platforms using the OpenGL standard, allowing it to be used on the Mac OSX and PC Linux platforms; and advances in grid generation, including a Viscous Grid/Navier-Stokes capability, which makes the software a predictive, rather than reactive tool.

One of the most significant additions to the new version is the capability to simulate viscous fluid flows by solving Navier-Stokes equations. Before, unstructured grid methodology was limited to inviscid flow problems. The new enhancements combine the capability of unstructured grids to handle complex configurations, with the power of NavierStokes computations.

The user-intensive components of TetrUSS - GridTool, VGRID, and POSTGRID - have an easy-to-use graphical interface due to years of refinement. The components are written in several programming languages including C, Objective-C, FORTRAN, and AppleScript. In 2002, key components of TetrUSS were modified to support the OpenGL graphics standard. Originally, the software was developed to only work on Silicon Graphics (SGI) workstations.