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Traffic deluge at Nasa website
Nasa website clocks all-time high visitor traffic during Space Shuttle Discovery STS-114 mission.
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT
19 August, 2005: Did you log into Nasa's website sometime in the last one month? if yes, you are among the 2.6 million space-watchers who Nasa claimed thronged its website, taking an active interest in the developments in its space exploration and discovery.
Nasa regularly updates its website on developments in space technology and Nasa's own activities. The site offers news alerts and news letters, besides minute-by-minute coverage of nail-biting events like the Space Shuttle launch and landing.
Nasa claims that the Space Shuttle Discovery and STS-114 have generated one of the biggest live Web events in the Internet's history. According to Nasa's logs, www.nasa.gov shows over 2.6 million visitors visiting the site at some point during the two-week STS-114 mission which took Shuttle Discovery to space and back.
The Space Shuttle Discovery returned home on August 9, 2005, after a 14-day, 5.8 million-mile journey. The NASA Web portal is managed jointly by the Office of Public Affairs and the Chief Information Officer. eTouch Systems of Fremont, Calif., is the portal's prime contractor. The portal is hosted by VeriCenter of Houston.
Users also watched about 435,000 webcast streams of NASA Television during the launch and nearly 400,000 during Discovery's landing on August 9th.
Dean Acosta, deputy associate administrator for Public Affairs at NASA Headquarters in Washington said: "The number of people coming to our Web site during this important flight shows incredible curiosity and interest. If there's a 'Top 10' list of live Internet events, I believe NASA can claim three of the top spots. We're so excited that the world wants to be a part of our ongoing mission of exploration and discovery."
NASA's webcasts are neary four times that of an agency record in July during Deep Impact. On July 4, during the Deep Impact mission, NASA sent out 118,000 webcast streams. In January last year, Nasa transmitted barely 50,000 streams on the Mars Exploration Rover landing.
Beating all records, the NASA Portal Web traffic reached a new record of 200,000 pages per minute during the space shuttle launch, and landing-related traffic at around at 150,000 pages per minute. On a cumulative basis, this adds up to about 9 billion page views per month.
Pat Dunnington, NASA's chief information officer said: "The mission provided us with both a challenge and an opportunity to provide a service at an unprecedented level for NASA. We're encouraged by the growing interest in the agency's Internet presence and are constantly applying information technologies in ways that enable distribution of NASA's mission knowledge and exploration excitement to the widest possible audience."
For the Discovery launch Yahoo! and Akamai, were transmitting data at a rate of over 45 gigabits per second. During the entire Space Shuttle Discovery STS-114 space mission, 600 terabytes of information that would fill 120,000 DVDs, was accessed by the surfing public.
Keith E. Johnson, vice president of public sector, Akamai said: "Akamai is pleased to have played a role in this exciting and historical event, and we wish to congratulate NASA for a job well done, so that viewers all across the globe were able to see it live on the Internet. The growing consumption of news on the Internet like the Return to Flight Shuttle mission is just further proof that online activities are becoming part of the fabric of our daily lives."
BY OUR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT |
