NASA's Web Coverage Makes Deep ImpactNASA's Web Coverage Makes Deep Impact

NASA's Deep Impact mission earlier this week wasn't just a leap forward for the scientific community, it was also a huge success for the use of the Web as a channel for delivering dynamic content. The space agency's Deep Impact Web sites attracted about three times more traffic for this latest success than it did during last year's Mars Spirit Rover landing. Now NASA is bracing for its biggest Web event yet: the launch of its first space shuttle since losing the Columbia.

From 8 p.m. ET on July 3 until 8 p.m. the next day, the NASA.gov and Deep Impact sites were hammered with around 80 million page-view requests and about 8 million user sessions, which start when a user logs on to a NASA Web page and ends when that user leaves the site. This was a big increase over the Spirit's Jan. 5, 2004, landing, which attracted 30 million page views and 2.8 million user sessions during its first 24 hours on the red planet.

"We rarely see numbers that large within a 24-hour period," says Gray Hall, president and CEO of VeriCenter Inc., the company that hosts NASA's Web sites. VeriCenter hosts 50 NASA servers and 2 million NASA Web pages in its seven U.S. data centers.

There's more to come. On July 13, Web users will be able to log on to NASA's site to watch the Space Shuttle Discovery lift off from Kennedy Space Center en route to the International Space Station. This marks the first shuttle launch since the Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry in February 2003.

To prepare for the event, which NASA calls "Return to Flight," the agency is working with private industry to augment its bandwidth, says Brian Dunbar, NASA's Internet services manager. "We're partnering with companies that can provide bandwidth possibly in exchange for co-branding with NASA or sponsorship on the NASA.gov Web site," he says. Dunbar declined to provide further details on which companies will participate and how they will provide the additional bandwidth.

For the Deep Impact mission, NASA made sure the public would have access to its Web content by procuring additional bandwidth from its caching services provider, Speedera Networks Inc., which is being acquired by Akamai Technologies Inc.

It's just the latest example of NASA's push to stay in the public's consciousness, even as press coverage of the space agency's activities has dwindled. For NASA, the Web has become the only way for the public to witness firsthand all of the space agency's successes and failures. Although early shuttle missions were broadcast live on major television networks, by the late 1990s people caught only glimpses of launches and landings during evening news roundups.

In response, NASA also has launched it own television network of sorts, broadcast through the agency's Web site. During the Deep Impact mission, NASA TV's coverage of the impact peaked at 118,000 concurrent streams just as the space craft met the Tempel 1 comet head on. By comparison, the Mars Rover mission reached a peak of 49,672 concurrent streams the day the Spirit landed.

Although Return to Flight is likely to garner mainstream media coverage, NASA wants its Web sites to be the preeminent destination for real-time video, images, and other mission-related information. "It's essential to letting people know what we do," Dunbar says. "There's still an audience for the information we have and a great interest in NASA answering fundamental questions such as what a comet is made out of. That's the advantage of the Web: there are no intermediaries between us and the public."

NASA's progressive thinking and use of the Web may be just what's needed to reach out to a new generation of information consumers, particularly those too young to remember a time when space shuttles were nothing more than science fiction.

This story was modified on July 19 to correct the spelling of Tempel 1.