List of NASA Open Data Sources

So you want to win that Hackaton?

This might be a good place to start looking for data.

I collected here the main NASA Open Data websites that you can use to find raw data and APIs for your project.

If you need inspiration you can search in a database of previous NASA Space Apps Challenge projects.

Please note: This is not an official NASA website. But I am a NASA Space Apps Challenge Ambassador and a NASA Datanaut who likes working with open data like you.

Data Catalog

data.nasa.gov/browse
  • A NASA Data Catalog that is home to 42,966 datasets
  • 99,9% are External Datasets → Links to data living on another server
  • Filters:
    • Categories: not all datasets have one set; cannot filter for multiple categories at once
    • View Types: 99,9% are External Datasets → follow link to download/access the data; 17 are Datasets that live on this page → these can be displayed/analysed here or exported
    • Tags: 6869 tags; not easy to use
  • Sorting: try sorting by 'Most accessed' and a less specific search query (e.g. 'mars') to get the most popular datasets

Dev Portal - APIs

api.nasa.gov
  • A list of 17 NASA API's and description of their usage
  • A place to generate an API key that can be used to access data across all data.gov federal agency sites
  • Use the ?api_key=DEMO_KEY to try out the APIs before you generate your own. E.g.: 
    https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod?api_key=DEMO_KEY
  • Rate Limits:
    • DEMO_KEY: 30 requests / hour; 50 requests / day
    • API Key: 1000 requests / hour;
  • Browser the APIs
  • View an example usage of the EPIC API

Open Source Code Catalog

code.nasa.gov
  • NASA's open source code projects, currently 555
  • About half of them are hosted on GitHub; The rest links to a project page and might require time to get
  • GitHub projects are generaly free to use but always read the corresponding LICENCE file

NASA Images

images.nasa.gov
  • Almost daily updated NASA image and video resource
  • Images of Earth, Space, People and events; anything from NASA
  • The materials are generaly not copyrighted and free to use except for the NASA logo itself; Read the full guidlines here

Satellite Imagery

worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov
  • Browse the latest, global, full-resolution satellite imagery (taken within 3 hours)
  • Browse historical daily imagery (back to 2010)
  • Add layers or data from satellites (for example fires and thermal anomalies)
  • Download the underlying data
  • Generate and download gif animations from selected frames

NASA Sounds

soundcloud.com/nasa
  • Collection of NASA sounds from historic spaceflights, current missions and more
  • Free to listen to all
  • Some available for download (after free registration and login)

Created by Napszel, 2020