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NASA to Digitize its 50 Years of Photos and Films

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-lot-of-scanning dept.

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."

3 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. A good investment by thc69 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:A good investment by DerekLyons · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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?
      Nope. Mostly because the segment of the public that will actually be impressed by this isn't large enough to be noticeable (politically).
       
      Well, maybe they would constitute a majority is some remote county in Montana.
  2. Harder than you think by Teancum · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.