NASA Awards 2007 Software of the Year

Monday, September 01 2008

Software from Jet Propulsion Laboratory for detecting planets outside our solar system, and from Ames Research Center for defining safety margins for fiery spacecraft re-entries have been named co-winners of the 2007 NASA Software of the Year Award.

The NASA Software of the Year competition was initiated in 1994, and rewards outstanding software developed by the agency. The competition is sponsored by the NASA Chief Engineer, with technical support from NASA’s In ventions and Contributions Board. For more information on the 2007 winners and runners-up, click here.

Adaptive Modified Gerchberg- Saxton Phase Retrieval Software

Team: Scott Basinger, Siddarayappa Bikkannavar, David Cohen, Joseph Green, Catherine Ohara, David Redding, and Fang Shi

JPL’s software characterizes the optical errors in a telescope system using innovative and robust algorithms. The software may be integrated into a telescope’s calibration control loops to correct those errors and markedly improve optical resolution. JPL’s software can be applied to other sciences and systems that use light, such as laser communications and extrasolar planet detection.

The software is used at the California Institute of Technology’s Palomar Observatory in northern San Diego County. A software suite was developed as a way to calibrate the internal static errors in the Palomar Adaptive Optics system. The Adaptive Modified Gerchberg- Saxton (MGS) Phase Retrieval imagebased wavefront sensing algorithm provides wavefront error knowledge for control corrections.

Early work for the software was based on efforts to correct the vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. After initial images came back blurry, engineers worked for months to determine the problem. Eventually, astronauts traveled to the telescope to install a corrective lens based on telescope-imaging errors. The software played a significant role in designing next-generation telescopes such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2013.

“Several years ago, it took teams of experts months to agree on a correct prescription for a telescope lens,” said team member Siddarayappa Bikkannavar. “Our software can do all of that in just a few minutes.”