NASA Image & Video Library Scraper

Scrape the official NASA Image and Video Library (images.nasa.gov) by search query and get clean, structured JSON for every result: title, description, date, NASA center, keywords, photographer, location, preview image URL and the asset manifest link. No API key required. Datacenter-proxy friendly.

Built on NASA's public images-api.nasa.gov endpoint, so results are the same public-domain media you see on the NASA website — ready for media sourcing, education, machine-learning datasets and content pipelines.

Features

• 🔍 Search-driven — pass one or more queries (e.g. apollo 11, mars rover)
• 🖼️ Media types — filter by image, video, audio, or any
• 🚀 No key, no login — public NASA endpoint, works on datacenter proxies
• 📦 Structured output — one clean, flat record per item
• 🔗 Preview + manifest URLs — thumbnail preview plus the full asset manifest
• ⚡ Fast & cheap — pure JSON API, no headless browser

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	select	search	Scraping mode. Currently search.
queries	array of string	["apollo 11","mars rover"]	Search terms to look up in the NASA library.
mediaType	select	image	image, video, audio, or any (omits the media_type filter).
maxItems	integer	100	Max items across all queries. Capped at 1000.

Example input

{
    "mode": "search",
    "queries": ["apollo 11", "hubble deep field"],
    "mediaType": "image",
    "maxItems": 200
}

Output

Each dataset item looks like:

{
    "nasa_id": "jsc2007e034221",
    "title": "Apollo 11 spacecraft pre-launch",
    "description": "Personnel atop the 402-ft. Mobile Service Structure look back at the Apollo 11 spacecraft...",
    "media_type": "image",
    "date_created": "1969-07-11T00:00:00+00:00",
    "center": "JSC",
    "keywords": ["Apollo", "Apollo 11", "Launch"],
    "photographer": "NASA",
    "location": "Kennedy Space Center",
    "preview_url": "https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2007e034221/jsc2007e034221~thumb.jpg",
    "asset_manifest": "https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/jsc2007e034221/collection.json",
    "source": "nasa",
    "scraped_at": "2026-07-21T00:00:00+00:00"
}

The asset_manifest link returns a JSON list of every downloadable rendition (original, large, medium, small, thumbnail) for that item.

Pricing

Roughly ~$0.50 per 1,000 items in platform usage — this is a lightweight JSON-API scraper with no headless browser, so runs are quick and cheap.

Use cases

• Media & image sourcing — pull public-domain space imagery for articles, decks and video.
• Education — build classroom galleries and lesson materials from real NASA archives.
• ML datasets — assemble labeled image/video datasets (keywords, centers, dates) for training.
• Content pipelines — feed newsletters, social posts and apps with fresh space media.

Related actors

• NASA NEO (Near-Earth Object) Scraper
• Openverse Media Scraper
• Wikimedia Commons Scraper
• Met Museum Scraper

Keywords

nasa scraper, nasa images api, space images, nasa image library, apollo, mars rover, hubble, public domain images, media dataset, education dataset, image scraper, video scraper, astronomy data, ml training data, content sourcing

Notes

All media returned by the NASA Image and Video Library is generally in the public domain (see NASA's media usage guidelines). This actor only reads NASA's public API and does not require authentication.