NASA Uploaded Every Picture It Has to One Amazing Online Archive
The coolest images and videos ever funded by your tax dollars are just a few keystrokes away.
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.
Mind you, NASA has been uploading pictures and other forms of media for years now. But previously, as Ars Technica points out, the agency's vast treasure trove of pics and clips has been spread out amongst different NASA websites, based on where the files had been stored before being uploaded—the Johnson Space Center in Houston's media was at its site, the Kennedy Space Center's photos and videos were elsewhere, and so forth.
By working with a private partner called InfoZen, however, NASA was able to merge all its libraries into one cloud-based database. And thanks to what we can only imagine was a mind-bendingly-boring process of metadata tagging, they're all easily searchable. You can even sort them by type (photograph, video, or audio) and by year, or just flip through the newest or most popular pieces of media. And many of them are in the sort of high-resolution quality Flickr users dream about.
We grabbed a few cool images for this post, but feel free to click here and go surf around the site for yourself. Be warned, though: You might just wind up losing track of the rest of your day.
