Next week will mark 25 years of continuous human presence on the International Space Station. Robert Pearlman at Ars Technica has linked to a website that celebrates the monumental achievement:
Fortunately, the astronauts and cosmonauts on the space station have devoted some of their work time and a lot of their free time to taking photos, filming videos, and calling down to Earth. Much of that data has been made available to the public, but in separate repositories, with no real way to correlate or connect it with the timeline on which it was all created.
That is, not until now. Two NASA contractors, working only during their off hours, have built a portal into all of those resources to uniquely represent the 25-year history of ISS occupancy.
ISS in Real Time, by Ben Feist and David Charney, went live on Monday (October 27), ahead of the November 2 anniversary. In its own way, the new website may be as impressive a software engineering accomplishment as the station is an aerospace engineering marvel.
This video provides an overview of this incredible project:
The work that went into this is breaktaking.