UA-Developed Software Used for NASA Moon Missions

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. - An open-source software toolkit developed at UA plays an important part in NASA's ongoing and future missions, including Artemis I and Artemis II.

Developed at The University of Alabama in Dr. Rohan Sood's lab, the Astrodynamics Software and Science Enabling Toolkit is software that helps researchers calculate and design trajectories to destinations in space. This can take the form of evaluating safe trajectories, as with the Artemis I and II missions, or exploring new destinations, as with the Solar Cruiser and SWIFT missions.

ASSET was also used to analyze the trajectory of Artemis I's Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS, which helped boost the Orion spacecraft towards the Moon.

Helping the Rocket Scientists Share Data

ASSET arose out of a need for better communication of data between researchers at different institutions involved with aerospace projects.

"Every center has their own tools that work great," Sood said. "But when multiple centers working on the same mission need to share data, they have to figure out how to make these tools talk to each other."

If they are paying for a license to someone else's tool, that is another barrier to sharing information. The issue can cause costly delays or potentially even mistakes.

To bridge the gap, the call for proposals specified that the tool selected for funding must remain open source. This means the software tool is freely available and users are in constant communication with the tool's developers in Sood's lab.

"ASSET came out in 2022, and we have kept improving it based on feedback from users," he said.

This tool is used by university researchers, federal institutes and private companies.

A Tool that Makes Careers

While ASSET is intended to advance science at research centers across the country, University of Alabama students benefit in another way: jobs.

Because students in his lab help with the continuous improvement of the open-source software, they graduate as experts in its use. This has proven to be an enticing line item on students' resumes. His students usually have multiple job offers before graduation.

One company in the aerospace sector that uses ASSET has already hired three UA students.

The Secret Weapon

One of the things that makes the UA-developed tool so popular is the optimizer at its core. The optimizer, also developed at UA, is another piece of open-source software that does not require a license. The optimizer, called PSIOPT, is a tool that helps users ensure the solutions they design are the optimal solutions given their mission goals and variables. As the tool continues to develop, he envisions the optimizer being used in a wide range of applications.

"The toolkit and its optimizer developed within his Astrodynamics and Space Research Laboratory are so versatile that, no matter whether you are in aerospace engineering or business, if you know what you are doing, you can use them to optimize anything," Sood said.