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State of Public Sector Cloud Computing - Be a Martian
Case Study: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Engaging the public in citizen science with social media and crowd-sourcing on a scalable cloud platform
Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) brings science to the American people by inspiring interest in the planet Mars. The laboratory sought to increase the impact of its education and outreach program by using technology. It wanted not just to give Mars data to the public, but rather to excite the public about Mars.
To meet this challenge, JPL developed an interactive website, BeAMartian.jpl.nasa.gov, using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. An application programming interface (API) connects website visitors with 250,000 pictures of Mars, available without having to store any additional data on JPL computers. On the cloud, individuals can virtually explore the planet by browsing pictures, watching videos, and creating tags. They can post questions, read responses, and send messages to Mars. The more content a visitor contributes to the site, the more reputation points they earn in their account. For participants, this is a fun way to learn more about Mars.
"JPL chooses to keep it real through early exploration of multiple clouds.” said Tom Soderstrom, Chief Technology Officer of NASA's JPL. "In other words, JPL wants to be an intelligent user of clouds and the only way we can do that is by being proactive and trying them out, end-to-end with real mission data. We’ve been exploring the clouds by partnering with JPL missions and industry partners for about two years now and have several very good use cases and stories."
With this cloud computing solution, NASA has successfully engaged a crowd of users. Users have created over 2,000 pieces of social media and inspired 200 stories on TV, radio, and in print. There have been 2.5 million API queries from NASA crowd-sourcing applications and 500,000 API queries from developers. The Town Hall area of the website has received over 40,000 votes and 5,000 individuals and teams have registered for a NASA sponsored competition. This crowd has also helped NASA identify craters and other features of the Martian surface. JPL has benefited from this outreach by having engaged users and by exploring and learning about new cloud-based technologies.
