Washington, Mar 2 (IANS): NASA on Thursday released its 2017-2018 software catalog, which offers an extensive portfolio of software products for a wide variety of technical applications, all free of charge to the public, without any royalty or copyright fees.

"The software catalog is our way of supporting the innovation economy by granting access to tools used by today's top aerospace professionals to entrepreneurs, small businesses, academia and industry," said Steve Jurczyk, Associate Administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) in Washington.

Available in both hard copy and online, this edition of the publication has contributions from all the agency's centres on data processing/storage, business systems, operations, propulsion and aeronautics.

It includes many of the tools NASA uses to explore space and broaden our understanding of the universe.

One of the programmes included in the new NASA software catalog is LEWICE, developed to help study the effects of ice on an aircraft in flight.

A number of software packages are being presented for release for the first time. Each catalog entry is accompanied with a plain language description of what it does.

NASA published the first edition of its software catalog in April 2014. Since then, NASA has shared thousands of its software programs with students, industry, individuals and other government agencies.

"Software has been a critical component of each of NASA's mission successes and scientific discoveries. In fact, more than 30 per cent of all reported NASA innovations are software," said Dan Lockney, NASA's Technology Transfer programme executive.

"We're pleased to transfer these tools to other sectors and excited at the prospect of seeing them implemented in new and creative ways," Lockney said.