NASA announced that it has awarded $15.6 million (14.5 million euros) in grants to 15 projects to maintain open source tools, frameworks and libraries used by the space agency's scientific community, for the benefit of all. “The agency’s Open Source Tools, Frameworks, and Libraries grants support the sustainable development of tools that are freely accessible to all and essential to the goals of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate.”
“An integral part of our missions”
“We received almost twice as many proposals this year as the previous call,” said Steve Crawford, open science implementation program manager in the Office of the Chief Science Data Officer at NASA Headquarters. in Washington. “The enthusiasm of the NASA scientific community for this program demonstrates the need for sustained support and maintenance of open source software. These projects are integral to our missions, essential to our data infrastructure, support machine learning and data science tools, and are used by our researchers, every day, to advance the science that protects our planet and expands our understanding of the universe.”
This awards program is funded by NASA's Office of the Chief Data Science Officer. The call for proposals was aimed at two types of awards:
– Core Awards: Cooperative agreements of up to five years for open source tools, frameworks, and libraries that have a significant impact on two or more divisions of the Science Mission Directorate.
– Support Awards: Grants or cooperative agreements of up to three years for open source tools, frameworks, and libraries that have a significant impact on one or more divisions of the Science Mission Directorate.
“A commitment to open sharing”
For example, in the first category of fundamental awards we find the project “Modernize and extend the essential infrastructure of arXiv” (arXiv is an open archive of electronic preprints of scientific articles, accessible free of charge via the Internet), and in the second category of support awards “Ensuring a fast and secure kernel for Scientific Python. Security, accessibility and performance of NumPy, SciPy and scikit-learn.
In its Open Science section, “NASA has a long-term commitment to building an open and inclusive scientific community over the next decade. Open source science is a commitment to the open sharing of software, data and knowledge (algorithms, articles, documents, ancillary information) as early as possible in the scientific process.
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