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NASA Opens Space Image Library

Posted by Soulskill on from the pretty-pictures dept.

slatterz writes with an excerpt from a brief PC Authority article: "NASA is to make its huge collection of historic photographs, film and video available to the public for the first time. A partnership with the non-profit Internet Archive will see 21 major NASA imagery collections merged into a single searchable online resource. The NASA Images website is expected to go live this week. The content of the site covers all the diverse activities of America's space program, including imagery from the Apollo missions, Hubble Space Telescope views of the universe and experimental aircraft past and present." The site is working already, and it looks fantastic. Don't hesitate to share any interesting pictures or movies you find.

5 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. hopefully they'll start from the beginning by beanerspace · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is great, my only hope is that they start with the older stuff first.

    I've got some old 8x10's my father would bring home - he was an engineer at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center from the beginning of the space race through to the Jupiter probe.

    Now I have these wonderful images I can share with my young daughter of what an old computer looks like and the slide-ruled people who ran them.

    I know I'm gushing, but this is going to be great in so many ways, as along with some spectacular shots of space - we'll also see down-to-earth images of the culture at the time that cannot be expressed even in 1000 words.

    --

    healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
    1. Re:hopefully they'll start from the beginning by unlametheweak · · Score: 5, Funny

      The flag in that photo looks like it was Photoshopped.

  2. Rover tracks by CmdrSammo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I really like this image showing the rover tracks leading back to the Apollo 14 Lunar Module "Antares".

    How anyone can look at this image in particular and claim the landings were faked is beyond me. It's a wonderful image, let's just hope we'll be back there soon to take more!

  3. These images aren't correct... by Puffy+Director+Pants · · Score: 5, Funny

    They photoshopped out the Aliens and the Moonbase and the spot where Superman had a fight with that evil blond guy.

  4. Re:Poor image quality on more recent images by david.given · · Score: 5, Informative

    The old images were taken on real photographic film, which was then brought back to Earth and developed. Hugely expensive due to having to ship all that mass around, and only feasible at all on sample-return missions, but the quality is superb. The new images are taken using digital cameras, JPEG compressed, and transmitted back using the Deep Space Network; as a result, the quality is much lower. (On the other hand, shipping photographic film back from Mars is a little beyond our technical expertise right now.)

    It is possible to take high-resolution pictures from Mars, but it's not done very often because it takes too long --- a couple of weeks for a decent panorama; dozens of low-resolution pictures need to be taken, transmitted back, and then pieced together (mostly by hand). It's far more cost-effective to use low-resolution pictures. At that distance bandwidth is the main limitation; they've just been upgraded to a 256kbps connection, and the DSN only listens to them in short windows.

    This is less of a problem for spacecraft nearer Earth; JAXA's Kaguya lunar probe can send back HDTV video, for example, although still not live.