New directions at NASA Ames Research Center

Few people in the scientific community would dispute the role NASA has played in the advancement of aerospace and aerodynamic research in the 20th century. But to fulfill next-century goals of a manned mission to Mars and deep space exploration, NASA must drive the state of the art in computer science in the 21st century the way it has pushed advances in aerospace, rocketry, and aerodynamic research in the 20th century. However, NASA faces a wide array of difficult problems that, in order to be solved, require fundamental breakthroughs in virtually every area of computer science. During the past three years (1997-2000), NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) has led an effort to understand NASA´s future Information Technology requirements and the concomitant research investments necessary to meet them. This study process has converged on three IT research cornerstones upon which NASA can build its future: automated reasoning for autonomous systems, human-centered computing, and high-performance computing and networking. The article focuses on several projects that embody these three research cornerstones