How collaboration tools helps NASA search for black holes

Email chains and FTP drives just don't cut the mustard, says research scientist Brian Grefenstette

When it comes to human technological achievement, building a structure and having it successfully orbit the Earth is up there with space flight itself.

While the International Space Station is the most high profile of our planet's man-made satellites, there are numerous others, all doing important work in helping scientists understand our universe.

One of those is the NASA Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), a telescope orbiting 500km above the Earth, which concentrates on a specific section of the electro-magnetic spectrum - x-rays - enabling NASA to hunt for some of the less understood phenomena in the depths of space, including black holes, neutron stars and supernovas.

Brian Grefenstette, research scientist at California Institute of Technology (CalTech) and NuSTAR, is on the mission's science team, and explained how the explorer space telescope operates.

"We're primarily [using] an x-ray space telescope so we use next-generation focusing optics and x-ray detectors to look at emission from very hot gas around black holes, neutron stars and the interiors of supernovas when they explode," he told Computing.

That, Grefenstette explained, is achieved by a mix of "pure" telescope optics and intensive data analysis to determine what's out there.

"We have a telescope where every photon that comes through bounces off our optics, gets registered on our detectors then, on the ground, we have reconstruction software that makes images about intensity versus energy curves, which we can use to figure out things like the temperatures of the gas, what isotopes are decaying to make the x-rays we can see," he said.

With NuSTAR in orbit above the Earth, the team behind the project is spread across the globe, with scientists and researchers in countries including the US, the UK, Japan and Italy.

Therefore, in order for scientists across the world to work together in the hunt for black holes, NuSTAR employs Huddle enterprise cloud-collaboration software.

"Certainly, when we moved to Huddle it was great to have everything you'd want - calendars, discussion threads and so on - all in one spot, which we didn't have before," said Grefenstette. He described how the software enables multiple specialised work groups to coherently work together in documenting findings.

"We take observations from the data that comes down [from the telescope] then graduate students or post doctorates download that data, do the analysis and put together presentations on what we saw. In some cases it's very surprising when we didn't really know what we were going to observe before we did," he said.

Given the sometimes unusual nature of the discoveries, they're all discussed on teleconferencing and any alterations or references to documents are made within Huddle.

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How collaboration tools helps NASA search for black holes

Email chains and FTP drives just don't cut the mustard, says research scientist Brian Grefenstette

Huddle is also used for the editing of scientific papers - and there are a lot of those, with the NuSTAR team having produced more than 150 in the 1,400 days since the mission began - roughly one every 10 days.

"After doing the initial presentation, you want to generate the paper, peer reviews and external articles, so we use Huddle for hosting copies of those," said Grefenstette, describing it as a huge improvement over email.

"People put them up and we can get a lot of comments in one space, rather than in email where one person could ‘reply all' and you don't know what's going on," he said.

Deployment of Huddle, Grefenstette told Computing, has improved collaboration between groups of researchers on the NuSTAR mission.

"The efficiency with which we've been able to manage the science teams and really stay on task - and not having to worry about any extra organisational issues as far as distribution of data is concerned - that's been a huge benefit to the team," he said.

For NuSTAR, a major benefit of Huddle is that staff find it simple to use, something that Grefenstette described as important given that some of the older academics could be described as not entirely tech-savvy.

"From a science viewpoint, something like Huddle is nice because there's not a whole lot of buy-in," he said, describing the cloud software as "a nice in-between state where you can access it through email, but you've got the organisational things on top".

In addition to making it simpler to collaborate, Huddle also brings an extra layer of security - which Grefenstette described as "important to the scientific community" - to the NuSTAR mission.

"We're entering a phase now. When we observe something for one of our proposers, we've got to make sure information on where and how they want to point the telescope gets scooped by someone, who just takes their analysis before they've written a paper," he said, describing Huddle as "a nice, secure platform" and an improvement on previous methods.

"In the past we've tried an FTP drive, where you're trying to distribute passwords. It's do-able, but it's a pain. This takes all the nice layers of having a nice security level, without having to do the management yourself," said Grefenstette.