The program was launched quietly last year under NASA’s CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said.

“NASA is recognizing the value of free and open-source software in other sectors,” said Cowan-Sharp, a contractor at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. “CosmosCode is going one step further by allowing NASA scientists to begin a software project in the public domain, leveraging the true value of open-source software by creating an active community of volunteers.”

CosmosCode is indicative of a larger shift at NASA toward openness and transparency — things for which complex and bureaucratic government labs are not known. The software project is part of CoLab, an effort to invite the public to help NASA scientists with various engineering problems. NASA is also digging into its files from previous missions and releasing code that until now remained behind closed doors. Together, these projects are creating a sort of SourceForge for space.