NASA images will be archived online

NASA images will be
archived online

NEW YORK — NASA’s images from the Apollo moon landings, the Voyager planetary flybys and the many space shuttle missions will be accessible through a central, searchable Web site under a partnership between the space agency and the nonprofit Internet Archive.

The archive will spend millions of dollars to consolidate images that are already in digital form and to convert those that are not.

“The big payoff on this will be getting the terrific materials that are basically in the space centers up and available on the Internet,” said Brewster Kahle, the archive’s founder and digital librarian. “They are still images, different forms of film and video tapes over the years. The idea is to get it all online.”

Well, not all. Kahle said the archive won’t be able to digitize everything NASA has ever produced but will try to capture the images of broadest interest to historians, scholars, students, filmmakers and space enthusiasts.

Kahle said the images already in digital form represent the minority of NASA’s collections, and they are scattered among some 3,000 Web sites operated by the space agency. He said those sites would continue to exist; the archive would keep copies on its own servers to provide a single, free site to augment the NASA sites.

Besides images, the archive may also include audio files, printed documents, computer presentations and other material deemed historically significant.

The Internet Archive is bearing all of the costs, and Kahle said fundraising has just started. The five-year agreement is nonexclusive.

Japan will research
Internet replacement

TOKYO — Japan plans to start research on new networking technology that could one day replace the Internet amid its growing quality and security problems, according to the nation’s communications ministry.

U.S. and European researchers already have started similar efforts to rebuild the underlying architecture of the Internet.

Yoshihiro Onishi, assistant director at the Japanese communications ministry, said Japan must follow suit to stay competitive. Post-Internet network technology is expected to become imperative by 2020, he said.

When researchers largely knew one another, the Internet’s early architects kept the shared network open and flexible — qualities that proved key to its rapid growth. But that later allowed spammers and hackers to roam freely.

The network’s designers also assumed that computers would be in fixed locations and always connected, creating headaches as laptops and other mobile devices proliferated.

Many scientists are starting to believe a new network is needed. It could run parallel with the Internet or eventually replace it, or parts of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture.

Researchers may seek a network that consumes lower levels of energy.

The Japanese ministry wants to set up an organization with private sector involvement by the end of the year that will do the groundwork for starting the research. It will request money in the fiscal year to begin April 1, although the amount has yet to be decided.

Associated Press