Finally, NASA has its universe of images in one happy, searchable place

[Judi Lynn]

Finally, NASA has its universe of images in one happy, searchable place
Stars. Galaxies. Planets. Astronauts. But still no alien photos.

ERIC BERGER - 4/17/2017, 8:19 AM


When the Internet came along in the 1990s, like a lot of government agencies, NASA kind of scratched its head and wondered what to make of all this freely shared information. But unlike a lot of other agencies, NASA had a trove of images, audio, and video the general public wanted to see. After all, this was the agency that had sent people to the Moon, taken photos of every planet in the Solar System, and launched the Hubble Space Telescope.

So each of the NASA field centers—there are 10 of them—began digitizing their photo archives and putting them online. Johnson Space Center in Houston, for example, had thousands of images of space shuttle astronauts training and flying in space. Kennedy Space Center had launch photos. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory had planets, rings, comets, and more. Unfortunately, these images were spread across dozens of NASA.gov sites, with no good way to search the different databases.

"It was, to be honest, pretty frustrating because you had to have a lot of knowledge about NASA itself to know where a particular image might be," said Rodney Grubbs, imagery program manager for NASA. The space agency made some efforts with commercial companies in the 2000s to organize its image collection, Grubbs said—but mistakes were made. "It did not result in something that helped us," he said.

A few years ago, NASA tried again, working with a company called InfoZen. The challenge wasn't quite up there with landing humans on the Moon, but consolidating 140,000 images, videos, and audio files that existed in more than 100 collections was not exactly a simple challenge.

More:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/finally-nasa-has-its-universe-of-images-in-one-happy-searchable-place/

[Princess Turandot]

1. It's a great new site but it encompasses nowhere near the universe of NASA's online imagery!

It includes 140,000 items right now. The actual website is called the NASA Image and Video Library, located here: https://images.nasa.gov/

But NASA has millions of images online: Curiosity's individual archive alone has over 400,000 raw images in it. The HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has almost 50,000 hi-res eye-candy images in its website catalog, my personal favorite. (HiRise is also the instrument that located the UK's failed Beagle rover on Mars, as well as the ESA spacecraft that crashed there recently.)

The new site has a lot of popular images and is blessedly fast at downloading them, because the file sizes are modest. Anything that encourages public enthusiasm about NASA's tremendous body of work is a great help.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Princess Turandot, thank you, so much! n/t