ABSTRACT
The future of NASA is critically dependent on the development and implementation of new tools and methods from the information technology research community. A few examples are worth noting. The sophisticated unmanned exploration of Mars and other parts of the solar system, which will be aimed at answering fundamental science questions, such as the existence of early life forms in these environments, will require a new generation of automated reasoning tools. In addition, NASA’s role in the development of new air traffic management tools and methods to be evaluated and deployed by the Federal Aviation Administration must involve new approaches to optimizing the combined performance of experts on the ground (air traffic controllers) and in the air (pilots) and the supporting information systems. Ongoing safe operation of the Space Shuttle depends on new capabilities for early identification of the precursors to failure of safety-critical system components from maintenance data and sensors distributed throughout the system. Use of the mountains of data generated by the Earth-observing satellites and next-generation space telescopes fielded by NASA demands fundamentally new methods of data interpretation and understanding. In addition, new aircraft and spacecraft designs depend on new high performance computing capabilities.
