Noise to Signal makes it to NASA!

NASA wrapped its first Open Source Summit a few days ago, bring members of the open source community together with NASA engineers and policy-makers together to discuss ways of helping NASA make the most of open-source software—and release more of it into the vacuum of space. (I may have misunderstood that last bit.)

And thanks to a tweet by Alex Howard, I discovered last night that one of my cartoons had appeared in one of the presentations:

The presenter was Patrick Hogan, who heads up NASA’s World Wind. It’s a virtual globe (think Google Earth) that includes not only our planet but also the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and its four Galilean moons, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And it’s an open-source project, built by a community of contributors.

I’m pretty damn ecstatic about this. Some of my fondest early memories include watching blurry images of Neil Armstrong’s first moonwalk on my family’s black-and-white TV. Shivering in a cold rural Ontario night while my dad helped me locate Mars in the finder scope of my Tasco telescope. Playing for hours with a model Saturn V rocket and Lunar Excursion Module. And then, much later, watching with an allow of delirious excitement and awe as the Space Shuttle prototype flew (piggybacked on a 747) through Ottawa’s skies.

Or, as I put it last night,