American Museum of Natural History Awarded Over $6 Million from NASA to Visualize Current Exploration of the Cosmos
The science visualization team at the American Museum of Natural History has started work on an open source software platform to visualize dynamic data from current NASA mission activities and scientific observations. Called OpenSpace, the five-year project is funded by NASA under a cooperative agreement at nearly $6.3 million and will provide users with the ability to convert massive amounts of data about celestial objects, phenomena, and space missions into striking visualizations in real time. At a Hayden Planetarium special event on September 12, an alpha version of OpenSpace will simulate OSIRIS-REx, a mission scheduled to launch this month to retrieve an asteroid sample and bring it to Earth.
The Museum’s Hayden Planetarium currently navigates its Digital Universe dataset—the most complete, scientifically accurate three-dimensional atlas of the universe—with Uniview, software that was specifically developed to visualize its static data. OpenSpace will go beyond Uniview’s capability by visualizing dynamic data sets in real time. Based on the success of 2015 pilot efforts to visualize the New Horizons mission to Pluto and space weather simulation data generated by NASA Goddard’s Community Coordinated Modeling Center, OpenSpace will be developed to allow unparalleled viewing of dynamic data in 3-D, allowing one to fly through the universe and observe processes and specific objects from different views. OpenSpace will also facilitate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and improve scientific literacy by engaging students, teachers, researchers, and the general public in NASA’s space explorations through innovative educational programming.
“While our use of the Digital Universe has provided an illuminating view of the known cosmos, OpenSpace aims to bring this ‘seeing is believing’ approach a step further,” said Carter Emmart, Director of Astrovisualisation at the Museum, who will be presenting the immersive OSIRIS-REx visualization. “Whether it’s dynamically simulating NASA missions, fostering scientific collaboration through an open source design, or synchronizing presentations with planetariums across the globe, OpenSpace hopes to take a sense of discovery that is usually reserved for those in mission control and make it a shared one.”
The Museum will be partnering with institutions including the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, the University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and Linköping University in Sweden to develop OpenSpace. In addition, a network of leading science institutions will work on associated programming to engage diverse audiences. The project will also draw on a model similar to the Museum’s annual hackathon, where developers, designers, and data scientists create software prototypes and apps to solve a specific problem over a span of 24 hours. The alpha version of OpenSpace is already available for download.
The Museum is one of 27 institutions that has entered into cooperative agreements with NASA to move forward STEM education projects and programs.
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