For the third year, and as part of its Technology Transfer Program, NASA is releasing its annual software catalogue, available to everyone and completely free. A bunch of them are only just being released to the public, so it’s your time to snag it and feel like a badass movie scientist.

Software plays a huge part in NASA’s mission and research successes.

“Software has been a critical component of each of NASA’s mission successes and scientific discoveries. In fact, more than 30 percent of all reported NASA innovations are software,” said Dan Lockney, NASA’s Technology Transfer program executive. “We’re pleased to transfer these tools to other sectors and excited at the prospect of seeing them implemented in new and creative ways.”

Of course, most of the available downloads are related to topics that are perhaps of no real use for you (unless you’re launching satellites from your rooftops), like rocket science and propulsion, but there’s health monitoring, environmental science software, and data processing tools.

With 15 different categories, ranging from Design and Integration to Climate Simulators, there’s plenty of browsing material for you to check out at your leisure, but NASA kindly compiled a Top 20 most requested software titles for you to start your software download journey.

Though the catalogue has various levels of access restrictions, there’s open source material that you’ll easily be able to download directly, but you’ll have to create an account in order to access others.

“The software catalog is our way of supporting the innovation economy by granting access to tools used by today’s top aerospace professionals to entrepreneurs, small businesses, academia and industry,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) in Washington. “Access to these software codes has the potential to generate tangible benefits that create American jobs, earn revenue and save lives.”

Let us know which are your favorites and which we should definitely check out!

Source: The Huffington Post