IBM on Friday is announcing that NASA is using the Rational Rose RealTime tool to help develop software for the successor to the Hubble space telescope.Called the James Webb Space Telescope, it is due to be launched in 2013, said IBM Fellow Grady Booch.The NASA application is a departure from the enterprise arena, where SOA tends to dominate, Booch said. “In this space, it’s a very different kind of architecture,” with reactive systems that must deal with time-critical events, he said. The application is to be developed in the C++ language and feature 200,000 lines of code. It will be responsible for orienting the telescope for conducting experiments. “The telescope itself is very software-intensive,” Booch said. The Webb telescope will be able to examine galaxies far deeper than the Hubble system, he said. Rational Rose RealTime leverages the Unified Modeling Language (UML) 2.0 specification. The product provides a means of visualizing and constructing systems for real-time domains, said Booch. Also being used by NASA are IBM’s ClearCase and ClearQuest tools. With Hubble, each component and instrument were built by separate space agencies using proprietary software, IBM said. This proved costly and time-consuming. Utilizing open standards-based software in developing the Webb telescope will help developers write applications faster and mitigate risk, according to IBM. Software Development