| Michael Brundage | (brundage@ipac.caltech.edu) |
| Dave Van Buren | (dave@ipac.caltech.edu) |
Supernova is a networked collaborative environment we are building, specifically to support the design and construction of spaceflight projects starting with the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), but also for online collaboration in general. [1] This project traces its history to the Jupiter and AstroVR projects, which were collaborations between IPAC and PARC/Xerox. [2] We decided to follow up on these successes with Supernova.
Our Network Places exhibit contains additional information about Jupiter and AstroVR, the precursors to Supernova, including screen shots from these projects, and serves as recommended background material to Supernova.
Additional information:
Supernova and the SIM Collaboratory are components of a networked collaborative environment we are building. Our goal is to support the design and construction of spaceflight projects starting with the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), but the software is suitable for online collaboration in general. [1] This project traces its history to the Jupiter and AstroVR projects, which were collaborations between IPAC and PARC/Xerox. [2]
Supernova is funded through the NASA Applied Information Systems Research Program, grant NRA-96-10-OSS-055.
Dave Van Buren (dave@ipac.caltech.edu) is a Staff Scientist at the Infrared Processing Analysis Center. He is currently the Project Scientist for the Interferometry Science Center at Caltech/JPL and the Architect of the SIM Science Data Center. He was formerly US Instrument Scientist for the ISOCAM instrument on board the Infrared Space Observatory. He also serves on the Space Interferometry Mission's mission definition team and on its science working group. His software experience includes the design and implementation of numerous instrument data systems, a package for the removal of data artifacts based on physical modelling of instruments, and AstroVR (for which he was chief investigator). He gave an invited talk on AstroVR to the AAAS in February, 1996. He has published over 35 papers in astrophysics. He is the principal investigator for Supernova and the SIM Collaboratory.
Michael Brundage (brundage@ipac.caltech.edu) is the Senior Software Engineer for the Interferometry Science Center, which currently spans offices at the Infrared Processing Analysis Center (at Caltech) and the Inferferometry Center for Excellence (at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL). He is currently designing the software development process and environment for the ISC, and helping to define the architecture for processing and storing data from the Keck Interferometer in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Michael received his B.S. degree from Caltech and his M.S. degree from the University of Washington, both in Mathematics. He is an experienced Java, MOO, C, and C++ developer, with five years experience with Java (and its predecessor, Oak) and over five years' experience developing collaborative environments. Two such projects were shared application support in AstroVR for the image analysis tool Skyview, and an extensive MOO Web system (with tools such as an interactive Mathematica page) used to teach freshman calculus at the University of Washington. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and a reviewer for several publishers of Java books, including Addison-Wesley Longman and Manning. He is technical lead for Supernova and the SIM Collaboratory.
Marie Levine-West is a Member of the Technical Staff at JPL, where she has developed sophisticated modelling tools for dynamic structures. These tools have been applied to the Cassini and SIRTF flight projects, and will play a key role in the development of SIM.
Centered about the theme of collaborative sessions, the Supernova client will enable the user to interact with others online through streaming audio and video and other multimedia. Supernova also facilitates working together using both common desktop applications (such as word processors, graphics tools, or symbolic math packages) as well as new applications (such as shared whiteboards) custom-built from Supernova's GUI toolkit.
At its heart, Supernova is an advanced MOO client written in Java, although there is nothing in our design which is specific to MOO -- in theory, any kind of collaborative session can be managed. [3] The MOO server maintains state for each user and coordinates some scheduling activities (as in the shared whiteboard example). More than this, it defines a virtual environment in which users may interact with one another or programmable objects in the environment (which persist in the server's database). Although MOO is traditionally text-based, Supernova enhances it with a graphical user-interface, multicast audio/video, interaction with client-side applications, and other services. In this way, we can hide the details of the technology from the user and provide a richly interactive, collaborative experience. The SIM Collaboratory is the MOO we use as a testbed for Supernova and eventually as the environment for collaborative spacecraft design and desktop astronomy.