Forging a Path to Multi-Institution, Open-Source Mission Software for Science

NASA science missions in all parts of SMD share very similar requirements for data processing. There are efforts underway to bring institutions together in formulating common, open-source software elements that could be leveraged generically for missions of different sizes and scales, with an initial emphasis on lower data volume missions present in Heliophysics and Planetary science, but highly relevant for any kind of CubeSat mission. There are many challenges in getting multi-institutional efforts going, the primary one being funding and nearly all the others relating to finding self-interested reasons for institutions to coordinate and share resources. We will present a summary of these challenges, some of which have been described in a white paper to the Heliophysics decadal survey (Pankratz, 2023) and some of which will be freshly minted from a topical workshop in late April that is dedicated to the subject of open science data systems.