NASA Uploaded Every Picture It Has to One Amazing Online Archive by Will Sabel Courtney.
From the post:
Over the last five decades and change, NASA has launched hundreds of men and women from the planet’s surface into the great beyond. But America’s space agency has had an emotional impact on millions, if not billions, of others who’ve never gone past the Karmann Line separating Earth from space, thanks to the images, audio, and video generated by its astronauts and probes. NASA has given us our best glimpses at distant galaxies and nearby planets—and in the process, helped up appreciate our own world even more.
And now, the agency has placed them all in one place for everyone to see: images.nasa.gov.
…
No, viewing this site will not be considered an excuse for a late tax return. 😉
On the other hand, it’s an impressive bit of work, although a search only interface seems a bit thin to me.
The API docs don’t offer much comfort:
Name … Description q (optional) … Free text search terms to compare to all
indexed metadata.center (optional) … NASA center which published the media. description(optional) … Terms to search for in “Description” fields. keywords (optional) … Terms to search for in “Keywords” fields.
Separate multiple values with commas.location (optional) … Terms to search for in “Location” fields. media_type(optional) … Media types to restrict the search to.
Available types: [“image”, “audio”].
Separate multiple values with commas.nasa_id (optional) … The media asset’s NASA ID. photographer(optional) … The primary photographer’s name. secondary_creator(optional) … A secondary photographer/videographer’s name. title (optional) … Terms to search for in “Title” fields. year_start (optional) … The start year for results. Format: YYYY. year_end (optional) … The end year for results. Format: YYYY.
With no index, your results depend on your blind guessing the metadata entered by a NASA staffer.
Well, for “moon” I would expect “the Moon,” but the results are likely to include moons of other worlds, etc.
Indexing this collection has all the marks of a potential crowd sourcing project:
- Easy to access data
- Free data
- Interesting data
- Metadata
Interested?