NASA photo, video collection to be digitized

Gooey_GUI · 27 Aug 2007

NASA photo, video collection to be digitized

With a 50-year collection of photos, videos, films and other material, NASA's archives from manned and unmanned space missions is almost as vast as outer space.

And now, NASA is undertaking a project to put all of that material into a central archive that can be searched by space flight aficionados.

In an announcement Thursday, NASA said it has reached a deal with the nonprofit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection. The effort will be paid for solely through grants, foundations and individual contributions received by the Internet Archive.

NASA already has much of its collection online, but the material is 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, said spokesman Bob Jacobs. "One of the challenges, and the thing that interested the Internet Archive, is that the agency didn't have digital media storage [procedures in place] as one of its core competencies," he said. "The bottom line here is that we have lots of assets ... but we had no real coordinated and certainly no comprehensive search capability ... to find the best of our images."

That will change with the creation of a single resource online where visitors can search and find the high- and low-resolution images and information they want, he said.

The agency will begin by providing the most easily accessible images and other resources so they can be put into the new online database, with additional material added as it is unearthed. "There's 50 years' worth of materials here, and it's in a variety of media and locations," including 10 NASA field centers, Jacobs said.

Much of what is in the collection may be surprising when it is released as the five-year project gets up to speed, he said. "I don't think that any of us know the depth to which a lot of these assets are stored. You finish one project and you open up another box filled with things you've never seen before."

Paul Hickman, office manager for the Internet Archive, said the group will house the digitized collection on its high-capacity redundant servers in San Francisco, Europe and Egypt. Presently, the group handles an estimated 5 petabytes of storage, but more capacity can be added. "Whatever they have, we'll have the capacity for it," he said.

The Internet Archive was selected by NASA for the project following a competitive process, he said.

The images and other data will likely be provided to the Internet Archive on hard drives so that it can be transferred to the group's archives for storage, Hickman said. Other materials, including printed documents, microfilm, books, computer presentations, audio files and VHS video, will be scanned or copied and then digitized for the online archive.

Initial plans for the project call for the Internet Archive to consolidate NASA's major image collections in the first year, with more to come the year after that. In the third year, NASA and the Internet Archive will identify analog imagery that needs to be digitized and added. The two partners will also work to build a system to automatically capture, catalog and store future material in the online archive.

The project will allow the space agency to more easily share and showcase its unique achievements, including remarkable photos from its Mars rover missions and from its manned and unmanned voyages to the Moon and beyond.

"Any opportunity that we have to allow the public to experience these missions, well, they're just incredible opportunities for us to do that," Jacobs said. "We have some of the most amazing imagery of anyone on the planet."
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Star Trek for real! I wonder what resolution they will be after being digitized.

thecrownles · 27 Aug 2007

probably like crappy youtube size and resolution... until you get a paid account.

I can't wait until the space station videos of daily life are released.... see them playing with M&Ms floating in space.

Techno-Dann · 27 Aug 2007

I rather doubt that they'd require a paid account - look at their Astronomy Photo of the Day section, there's a lot of amazing pictures in there, in enough resolution to make nifty wallpapers.

supermonkey · 27 Aug 2007

thecrownles said: ↑

probably like crappy youtube size and resolution... until you get a paid account.

I can't wait until the space station videos of daily life are released.... see them playing with M&Ms floating in space.
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The video has been released, you just have to know where to find it. People all over the world are working with NASA Public Affairs and the video repository here at JSC to get all manner of spaceflight video. That's the great thing about NASA being a government organization: almost none of the imagery is copyrighted, and is available for public use.

Part of my job involves watching the Space Station daily life from 8-5, Monday through Friday. There's the odd gem every now and then, but it's mostly people typing on keyboards. In fact, right now I'm watching an empty US Lab and 3 random views of the external structure.

-monkey

cpemma · 27 Aug 2007

Let's hope they've found everything

But just 37 years after Apollo 11, it is feared the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark comes to mind...

edit: If it's not nailed down an Aussie will nick it...

Last week, up to 100 tapes, clearly marked “NASA Manned Space Center”, turned up after a search in a dusty basement of a physics lecture hall at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia.
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Stuey · 27 Aug 2007

I hope that they manage to do this within a reasonable period of time so that it doesn't eventually get shelved.

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NASA photo, video collection to be digitized

Gooey_GUI Wanted: Red Shirts

thecrownles What's a Relix?

Techno-Dann Disgruntled kumquat

supermonkey Deal with it

cpemma Ecky thump

Stuey You will be defenestrated!

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NASA photo, video collection to be digitized

Gooey_GUI Wanted: Red Shirts

thecrownles What's a Relix?

Techno-Dann Disgruntled kumquat

supermonkey Deal with it

cpemma Ecky thump

Stuey You will be defenestrated!

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