Flight controllers and engineers have been testing the new Systems Health Information Portal (SHIP) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston over the past three months. Officials have not decided when SHIP will go into production.

The internally built software is designed to help ground crews more quickly access and analyze data -- including current sensor readings, historical sensor readings and other technical documents -- that's often housed in disparate data-storage systems, NASA officials said.

The space station's initial components were launched in 1998, and it has housed astronauts since 2000. Its complexity often forces ground crews to cull through large amounts of data to determine the cause of anomalies, said Ronald Mak, senior computer scientist and an enterprise architect at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Mak was hired by NASA to work on its internal SHIP development team.

"Virtual views"

SHIP was built in nine months using Borland Software Corp.'s JBuilder Enterprise Edition tool set and Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Java Studio Creator. The application sends Web services messages through BEA Systems Inc.'s WebLogic application server to query back-end data sources when astronauts report an anomaly onboard the International Space Station, Mak said.