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NASA to Digitize its 50 Years of Photos and Films
Lucas123 writes "Putting the images and film online will allow NASA to more easily share and showcase its achievements, including photos from its
Mars rover missions and from its manned and unmanned voyages to the Moon and beyond, according to Computerworld's Todd Weiss. Much of NASA's archived photos and film is currently divided up into more than 20 different imagery categories, making it hard to find specific images or archives unless a user knows exactly where it is. "Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released," according to NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs."
Sounds like a good investment in marketing, an attempt to please the public so there will be more interest in NASA and more funding. Will it work?
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Why aren't they digitalized already? NASA of all people should have the money and technology to digitalized everything they have produced in their lifetime. Computers have been around a while, its what got us up into space (take it we have more powerful calculators than those computers......). I can understand older photographs and films being on film but shouldn't newer photos be all digital anyways?
God Of War ^^
Or, instead of spending the quarter or half billion dollars that you propose(or do you think it will really cost less than $1 per person?), they could just liberalize whatever media policy they have(or do they already have a pretty open media policy?) and let greedy bastards and wanton consumers do their thing.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Yeah, that's a tough call.
a) Bail out lenders who made crappy loans and idiot speculators (scalpers, actually) who took mortgages they couldn't afford, in the process making living costs surge.
or
b) Space exploration.
(Now replace a) with "Iraq War"!)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yes, it would be an excellent use of the $16B NASA gets. It would probably cost about $100M or less, under 0.625% of its annual budget. Which would be an investment in getting more budget. If promoting its triumph to Americans can't get a 0.625% return on our investment, then it either needs more invested, or the system is incapable of serving all Americans. Which is a failure of the system, because there's no doubt that Americans would like the programmes more than 0.625% additional with some tangible results in our hands.
One reason why Americans were more optimistic in the mid-1980s was because we were used to seeing inspiring NASA advances displayed in hugely impressive glory on our main media: TV and movies. Since then, TV has largely left us images of NASA failures (even impressive space repairs are tainted by the knowledge that we're fixing a failure, however predictable). While we've moved onto the Internet and DVDs for much of our entertainment.
Recapturing America's imagination requires sticking images into the media that engage our imagination. That was a PR battle to win in the 1960s, when it was TV. If we win it again in more personal, more interactive media, we will again inspire Americans more, and tap that enthusiasm in bigger NASA budgets.
--
make install -not war
Exactly. It's adorable how the same people who just love military funding bitch and moan about NASA. Fucking morons.
Do you honestly believe that they can do a project like that for less than 33 cents per person? You've never dealt with any sort of direct marketing, have you? Minimum cost for a project like this is about 2 bucks per (which is doing it on the cheap), which comes in at over half a billion dollars, or a little more than 3% of their annual budget. As I said, there are other much more economical ways to get funding than spending a small fortune on a direct mail campaign that most people will simply ignore.
Since then, TV has largely left us images of NASA failures (even impressive space repairs are tainted by the knowledge that we're fixing a failure, however predictable).
Oh, and BTW, about a third of the documentary I watched last night was about repairing satellites. Maybe you should remove your rose-tinted glasses...
One must say that, Any Space Agency is such and endevour that it deserve a little respect for some of it's work and achievements. Despite all the talk about NASA military ties, budget, mistakes, there's a good sense that NASA and EASA are really helping us find our size and place on this present universe. Cheers for NASA ( and all the good people ) that contributes with more JPGs for our wallpaper collections. Would buy a DVD if they ever release one with that DATA. keep up the good work folks.
Digitized into what multi-media format, at what bit depth and resolution, and is it a lossy or non-lossy compression?
Digital media formats are not nearly as "standardized" as you would seem to indicate here, and such multimedia computers have not "been around a while". Certainly not the computers that "got us up into space".
In addition, even those photos which were originally done as digitized data (aka the interplanetary space probes) have all had virtually incompatible file formats from even each other, much less even from traditional web media formats like PNG, GIF, or JPEG.
On top of all of this is the sheer volume of data available that can be digitized and made available. We are not talking just a couple hundred photos here that tend to hit the cover of National Geographic, but literally millions of photos. Earth observation photos bring in tens of thousands of photos each day on just a single satellite.
Even now, I question the ability of digital cameras to capture the saturation, dynamic color depth, resolution, and other optical characteristics found with analog film. Certainly digital cameras are getting better and better, but there is room for improvement well beyond what exists even now. Over time, digital cameras may be even superior to analog photographic techniques in most situations, but it won't get rid of all of the problems.
In short, I think that you have trivialized some very real and tough problems here involved with both cataloging as well as simply dititizing these photos, not to mention other multi-media data like audio and video.