NASA Launches Massive Digital Library For Space Video, Photos and Audio (space.com)

earlytime quotes a report from Space.com: NASA on Tuesday (March 28) unveiled a new online library that assembles the agency's amazing space photos, videos and audio files into a single searchable library. The NASA Image and Video Library, as the agency calls it, can be found at http://images.nasa.gov/ and consolidates space imagery from 60 different collections into one location. The new database allows users to embed NASA imagery in websites, includes image metadata like date, description and keywords, and offers multiple resolution sizes, NASA officials said. According to the NASA statement, other features include: Automatic scaling to suite the interface for mobile phones and tablets; EXIF/camera data that includes exposure, lens used and other information (when available from the original image); Easy public access to high resolution files; Downloadable caption files for all videos. The new NASA archive is not meant to be a complete archive of all of the space agency imagery. But it does aim to showcase what the space agency has to offer.

Comments

Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times must we endure this! Come on, Nasa, give us a break already.

Re:Again?

[Samantha Wright]

Probable reason: Trump's budget removes funding for NASA's education programs. Maybe he thinks Star Trek can pick up the slack again?

Re:Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Maybe he thinks Star Trek can pick up the slack again?

Do you think Trump's even able to half-grok Star Trek?

Re: Again?

[dougdonovan]

trump concentrates on the US and his investments globally.

NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't trust this. It's likely to be a hoax.

Torrent Availability

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a torrent of the current image/video/data set?

Re:Torrent Availability

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol. Old people don't torrent.

Re:Torrent Availability

[50000BTU_barbecue]

LOL neither do young people. Kid at work stared at me all smirky and asked why I cared about that, all he has to do is stream from Netflix if he wants to watch something.

I asked him if he knows what a "file" is.

We've come full circle. We're old, we're not cool, whatever we do is wrong.

Re:Torrent Availability

[boristdog]

Reminds me of the punk in a planning meeting a few years back. Us old timers were talking about packet sizes and network congestion preventing our test results from getting to the servers in a timely manner. Young turk pops up and tells us "we don't send 'packets', we send 'files' to the analysis software." and looked at us like we had no idea what we were talking about.

He ain't here no more.

Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline

[michelcolman]

I hope nobody is going to sue them for not making the photos accessible for the blind so they have to take the whole thing offline again.

Nah, that would never happen, right?

Re:Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline

[Anonymous Coward]

no need to worry. it will all be declared fake science and be pulled offline anyway.

Re:Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline

[silentcoder]

Actually - this could be somewhat valuable to the massive projects running right now to archive government science data in case the current administration decides to purge any of it.

Re:Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a LOT of effort put into making things Section 508 compliant. Videos were a long time coming because we had to ensure everything had captions playable in the web preview as well as downloadable versions.

Re:Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of NASA websites were taken down because it was simply way too much work to meet Section 508 compliance requirements, includes specific types of fonts for headers, subheaders, titles, spaces, bodytext, etc. Also all PDFs had to be image labeled including legacy PDF files. There are so many different types of NASA activities, the one-size-fit-all web formats are not suitable for many of these smaller activities, that it was way too much work to meet and continually meet ever increasing 508 standards. Just as well to bail from the internet.

Re:Let's hope nobody makes them take them offline

[Anonymous Coward]

You do see the irony in your post, yes?
Enforcement of Section 508, under the liberal flag of equal access, is actually taking information offline. Crickets from media.
Rumors and nebulous, baseless fear of Trump has taken nothing offline - but man have they mobilized an emotional frenzy of support.

Really, one might even give Trump credit for this new NASA archive, since it was unveiled under his watch.

Software?

[jawtheshark]

Anybody know what software they use?

Re:Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

JOEMAMA.EXE

Re:Software?

[Monoman]

This ^^^^^^^^^ /.ers want to know

Re:Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle on HP-UX on Itanium, with Microsoft IIS servers on the front-ends.

Re:Software?

[Anonymous Coward]

disaster

Re:Software?

[JacobKreutzfeld]

AngularJS for the front-end, served from S3. Pyramid for backend API, ImageResizer and Pipeline processes, on autoscaling EC2 infra with many other AWS native services. Infrastructure defined with Troposphere to generate CloudFormation.

Perfect timing

[Rei]

The timing on this is perfect. A group I'm in is working on a book and right now going through trying to get copyright permission on all of the images we want to use (and sometimes you can't get it without paying fees, or can't get in touch with the author). Having such a huge wealth of public domain images all together on one seemingly well-designed search engine will be great for finding substitutions.

Too bad there's no ready substitution for figures from papers, however :P For a nonprofit book a lot of the big servers charge around $50 per image. Which for a full length book (dozens of figures) is thousands of dollars. Most authors are very nice about granting permission, but the journals are all about cash.

Re:Perfect timing

[waveclaw]

Having such a huge wealth of public domain images all together on one seemingly well-designed search engine will be great for finding substitutions.

The images and videoes are searchable by tags. They have really good descriptions that break into keywords well. Lots of images of hardware, astrophotographs, locations, mission patches, buildings and people.

This is a huge resource of labeled images for supervised machine learning. A massive gift to anyone wanting to do image processing.

I am Russian Astronaut, when they give us Pornflix

[Anonymous Coward]

?
Space lonely like siberia and cold like your mother. I not allowed Vodka after hitting last sattelite to dock with. They say I drunk but haha no breathalyzer in space. I trade much vodka for space pornflix. Me can only do so many zero-g booger experiments a day.

Article 50

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Go!

Everybody Wang Chung to-nite!

Better that than to live and die in L.A.! To wonder why in L.A.!

I think

[silentcoder]

this site just broke the record for "fastest I've ever bookmarked anything".

Re:I think

[Rei]

Thankfully the URL is easy to remember... just like images.google.com.

It's kind of amusing searching for keywords that you wouldn't expect to show up on a NASA image search. For example, I found a Native-American juggling hoops, old ladies line dancing at a farmers' market, kids dressed as Men in Black dancing underneath the Shuttle Endeavour, people using the primary mirror of James Webb to take selfies, actress Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) singing, NASA's hip-hop dance team Forces In Motion (travels around middle schools teaching Newton's laws), James Ingram singing "I believe I can fly" in front of Bill Nye, NASA administrator Dan Goldin laughing with (hopefully not at) a "bubble boy" in a protective suit, enough frames of someone testing out a spacesuit to make a stop-motion dance video, and a bunch of other unexpected weirdness.

NASA

[Xertars]

I would like to go to the NASA database one day, I am curious what is hidden even before the earth community

Any photos of the entire Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, ones that aren't clearly montages and/or Photoshopped?

I wonder why there aren't any...

Re:Any photos of the entire Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at this one - sooo realistic:

https://images.nasa.gov/#/details-iss049e009355.html

Type in 'Lunar lander' - why are there no pictures of the Apollo lunar landers? Why are there endless pictures of random people doing nothing of any importance or relevance?

Re:Any photos of the entire Earth?

[Rei]

Because the name of it isn't "Lunar Lander", it's called the LM.

Re:Any photos of the entire Earth?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh really? So if you go up to a thousand members of the public and ask them "What does LM mean?", how many would say 'Lunar Lander'? And if you go up to a thousand members of the public and ask them "What does Lunar Lander mean?", most of them will know what you're talking about?

I see you couldn't answer my other questions, why was that?
Why are there no photographs of the entire Earth, that aren't obviously fake? (Anywhere, not just on the new NASA site.)
Why are there endless pictures of random people doing nothing of any importance or relevance, on the FIRST PAGE of the new NASA site?

Re:Any photos of the entire Earth?

[Rei]

LM doesn't mean Lunar Lander, it means Lunar Module. I don't know why you expect NASA's search engine to find things when you call them by the wrong name. Do you expect it to turn up pictures of the space shuttle if you type in "Space Bus"?

As for your other stuff, you're clearly trolling, and I don't feed trolls.

All of the photo and video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Including the ufos? The aliens?
The russians?
The secret CIA spacecraft? The Area 51 Air Force experimental spacecraft built using the Roswell UFO technology?

Well, All righty then! Please bring popcorn, lots of popcorn!

Why no 4k footage of the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why isn't there a satellite around the moon right now, sending back endless 4k footage of the moon? I mean, it's not as if there are millions of people who would love to watch this, of course. What are NASA's excuses going to be when they allegedly send their next lander to the moon, and the footage they send back is low quality, and not 4K?
Ditto for Mars... (Don't tell me - it's "too far away" to send 4K footage, yadda yadda yadda...

Re:Why no 4k footage of the moon?

[Rei]

What are you talking about? We''ve been sending some damned impressive cameras out into space of late. Heck, even not just "of late". Have you seen the HiRISE images of Mars? Forget 4k, you can download those in 8k.

Now, if you're talking constant live 4K video footage, the problem isn't the cameras, it's the bandwidth over such huge distances.

Re:Why no 4k footage of the moon?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you can't read properly. I said "moon", not "Mars".
Why did you talk about Mars when I clearly said the Moon?

Is the distance from the Moon such a "huge distance"? Of course not. So you don't have an answer.
"Why isn't there a satellite around the moon right now, sending back endless 4k footage of the moon? I mean, it's not as if there are millions of people who would love to watch this, of course. What are NASA's excuses going to be when they allegedly send their next lander to the moon, and the footage they send back is low quality, and not 4K?"

Any answers to THAT question, which you studiosly ignored?

Re:Why no 4k footage of the moon?

[Rei]

You said both the Moon and Mars. Can you not even read your own posts?

FYI, there are not "millions of people" who would like to sit around staring at a picture that only very slowly changes. And there's no point to live video anyway because there's no action; you can just broadcast stills and interpolate between them if that's what you want. All stills that NASA captures are released publicly for people like you to oggle at.

Lastly, in case you're actually curious, there are four missions active at the moon right now: ARTEMIS P1, ARTEMIS P2, LRO, and Chang'e 5-T1. The former two don't have cameras; they're simple satellites for studying radiation and magnetic fields. Chang'e 5-T1 is just a test mission for China to advance its technology for future moon missions. LRO is the only one that takes pictures. You can see them here. Unlike Mars, a well designed spacecraft like LRO (although not a cheap spacecraft) could have enough bandwidth for streaming live HD video. But LRMO is quite reasonably designed for science, not screensavers. It has three cameras. Two are black and white cameras which are more like a telescope (as with most spacecraft cameras) - black and white for maximum resolution (every pixel measuring brightness rather than every several combined pixels). I don't know if you've ever tried to capture video through a telescope while moving relative to the object you're trying to capture, but as a general rule it doesn't work very well, and there is nothing about the hardware that's setup for video processing. The third is a wide angle colour camera... "wide angle" in that the camera images are many times wider than they are tall, designed for capturing (nonaligned) strips of the surface in seven spectral bands (which do not correspond directly to what the human eye sees, but are most useful for determining the composition of the surface)

Not that they would ever waste such an expensive instrument's time on capturing a glorified screensaver for Slashdot ACs.

If you want a screensaver satellite, find someone who's willing to pay many tens to several hundred million of dollars to make a fancy screensaver.

Excellent timing, re: the Think Tank article

[nnappe]

Remember the overhead article produced by a "non partisan think tank" that surprisingly recommended NASA outsourced everything? This is the kind of thing they'd included as "overhead" with their ridiculous criteria.
I don't know enough to evaluate the current NASA administration, but I think it does many good things in reaching out to the community and keep NASA relevant to the American public.

Use of this material?

[cayenne8]

Hmm.

Anyone know off hand if these images/audio/video are free to use by the public, even commercially without fees or royalties?

Re:Use of this material?

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally yes, they are in the "public domain"
It is, of course, polite to credit the photographer and source.

Re:Use of this material?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check the Usage Guidelines link in the bottom of the page.
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelines.html

non-public NASA data

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA engineer here..
Nothing is hidden, per se, but it might be in an inconvenient format (tapes from a machine that no longer exists), or the documentation of the format was lost long ago.

There is non-public data:
a) proprietary design information from a vendor
b) source code for which NASA bought a limited use license to save money
c) data that is subject to export controls
d) the usual sort of limited access data - personnel files, home addresses, etc.
e) science data that is new enough it's under the embargo so the principal investigator gets first crack (this time is getting shorter and shorter)

And, just because the data is "releaseable to the general public" doesn't mean that there is a budget to do so. NASA does a pretty good job with outreach and distribution, but it costs something to pay for someone to dig up the data and release it. Generally, this only happens when someone asks. You can look at any NASA Center's FOIA logs and see what kind of obscure stuff people ask for and get.

Re:non-public NASA data

[k6mfw]

or routinely check http://nasawatch.com/ for the latest gossip.

Advanced search?

[CapS]

Is there a hidden advanced search? It would be nice to find images larger than a certain resolution, especially with our high resolution screens and printers these days. It would be nice to have some other options as well.

Other than that, the site is terrific!

Re:Advanced search?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I too want more desktop/tablet/phone wallpaper

Are they going to include...

[Anonymous Coward]

...the missing footage from those ISS feeds which keep going offline just as something comes into focus?