This software addresses the demand for easily accessible NASA JPL images and videos by providing a user friendly and simple graphical user interface that can be run via the Android platform from any location where Internet connection is available. This app is complementary to the iPhone version of the application. A backend infrastructure stores, tracks, and retrieves space images from the JPL Photojournal and Institutional Communications Web server, and catalogs the information into a streamlined rating infrastructure.

Sample Screen Shots of the Space Images Android Application: The feature graphic (a) is displayed on Google Play Android Market. The title and image thumbnails (b) are scrollable lists. When clicked, it will show the images in detail, as well as a caption describing the image (c). The user can rate the images by giving a star rating from 1 to 5. In addition, there is an option to share the image by e-mail, Facebook/Twitter, or save it to the user’s Android device (d)
This system consists of four distinguishing components: image repository, database, server-side logic, and Android mobile application. The image repository contains images from various JPL flight projects. The database stores the image information as well as the user rating. The server-side logic retrieves the image information from the database and categorizes each image for display. The Android mobile application is an interfacing delivery system that retrieves the image information from the server for each Android mobile device user. Also created is a reporting and tracking system for charting and monitoring usage.

Unlike other Android mobile image applications, this system uses the latest emerging technologies to produce image listings based directly on user input. This allows for countless combinations of images returned. The backend infrastructure uses industry-standard coding and database methods, enabling future software improvement and technology updates. The flexibility of the system design framework permits multiple levels of display possibilities and provides integration capabilities. Unique features of the software include image/video retrieval from a selected set of categories, image Web links that can be shared among e-mail users, sharing to Facebook/Twitter, marking as user’s favorites, and image metadata searchable for instant results.

This work was done by Jon D. Nelson, Sandy C. Gutheinz, Joshua R. Strom, Jeremy M. Arca, Martin Perez, Karen Boggs, and Alice Stanboli of Caltech for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For more information, see http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/apps/spaceimages/  .

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Dan Broderick at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. NPO-47961

Topics:
Computer software and hardware Imaging and visualization Information Technology Internet Optics Software Telecommunications

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    This article first appeared in the September, 2013 issue of Software Tech Briefs Magazine (Vol. 37 No. 9).

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