New directions at NASA Ames Research Center

Few people in the scientific community would dispute the role NASA has play ed int he advancement of aerospace and aerodynamic research in the 20th cen tury. But to fulfill next-century goals of a manned mission to Mars and dee p space exploration, NASA must drive the state of the art in computer scien ce in the 21st century the way it has pushed advances in aerospace, rocketr y, 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, NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) has led an eff ort to understand NASA's future Information Technology requirements and the concomitant research investments necessary to meet them. This study proces s has converged on three IT research cornerstones upon which NASA can build its future: automated reasoning for autonomous systems, human-centered com puting, and high-performance computing and networking. This article focuses on several projects that embody these three research cornerstones.