SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Imagery

April 17, 2017 3:25 PM

After many, many years and more than a few attempts, NASA finally has a place to search their images, videos, and audio. Brief story of the effort.

If you're interested, NASA's Instagram accounts are worth following.

posted by anem0ne (6 comments total)

Raaaaaaaad.
posted by cortex at 3:37 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

One of the developers posted a presentation with more technical details:

https://www.slideshare.net/shentonfreude/not-your-fathers-web-app-the-cloudnative-architecture-of-imagesnasagov

That's a lot better than when I worked with him and the cloud was new and scary.
posted by adamsc at 4:21 PM on April 17, 2017 [4 favorites]

Just NASA it.
posted by Fizz at 4:24 PM on April 17, 2017

Bless them for doing this, but the catalog is only 140,000 images. As a technical search problem this is not difficult. For a sense of scale, as of 2012 Facebook was dealing with 300M+ images a day. (And yes, those are also indexed and searchable by complex metadata schema. In real time, no less.) Those developer slides adamsc are reasonable enough, the main complexity they talk about is dealing with building a reliable system. Also they put in some effort to sensibly index new images as they come in, a corner that would be too easy to cut with disastrous future effects.

Still the software side of this should be a pretty small project. Maybe it was. I imagine the librarian part of this was much more complicated, collecting and cataloging all the images. Also the idea that NASA had anything approaching a Facebook-sized budget for software is hilarious.
posted by Nelson at 5:01 PM on April 17, 2017

I'm sure Lunar conspiracy theorists have a field day with images like this.
posted by fings at 5:28 PM on April 17, 2017 [1 favorite]

+
posted by tilde at 6:03 PM on April 17, 2017