Space & Earth Science Data

Fetch earthquakes and NASA astronomy data with verified endpoints. The mistakes this prevents: trusting community space APIs from training memory - the SpaceX API (api.spacexdata.com) and the popular ISS-position endpoints fail TLS or time out, verified - and burning NASA's shared DEMO_KEY quota mid-task.

Ranked APIs

1. USGS Earthquake FDSN (earthquake.usgs.gov) - DEFAULT for anything seismic. Global catalog, rich filtering, GeoJSON, no key, fast.
2. NASA APIs (api.nasa.gov) - APOD (picture of the day), NeoWs (near-Earth objects). DEMO_KEY works but is shared per-IP (~10-30 req/hr); a real key is a 30-second instant email signup at api.nasa.gov and lifts it to 1,000 req/hr. Use DEMO_KEY for one-off calls only.
3. NASA EPIC mirror (epic.gsfc.nasa.gov) - full-disk Earth imagery, no key at all on this host. Prefer it over the api.nasa.gov EPIC route, which spends key quota for identical data.

Procedure

1. Quakes: filter server-side. Time, magnitude, radius, and sort all belong in the query string - never fetch the whole feed and filter locally (templates below).
2. NASA: budget the key. One-off → DEMO_KEY. Anything in a loop, cron, or shipped app → tell the user to grab the instant free key and read the X-RateLimit-Remaining header. A 429 here means quota, not outage - the fix is a key, not a retry.
3. Convert epoch times. USGS time is milliseconds since epoch; NASA dates are YYYY-MM-DD strings. Report human-readable UTC.

Ask the user only if missing - quakes: region (default: global), min magnitude (default: 4.5), window (default: past 7 days). NASA: date (default: today).

URL templates + real response shapes

Earthquakes:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/query?format=geojson
  &starttime={YYYY-MM-DD}&endtime={YYYY-MM-DD}&minmagnitude=5
  &latitude=35.6&longitude=139.7&maxradiuskm=500        ← optional region circle
  &orderby=magnitude&limit=20

{"features":[{"properties":{"mag":6.2,"place":"58 km W of Tobelo, Indonesia",
   "time":1783045888846,"tsunami":0,"alert":"green","felt":7,
   "url":"https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000t9r5"},
  "geometry":{"coordinates":[127.63,1.73,10.0]}}],
 "metadata":{"count":1}}

Gotchas: geometry.coordinates is [lon, lat, depth-km] - longitude first. orderby=time is newest-first. alert (PAGER: green/yellow/orange/red) and tsunami are the impact fields worth surfacing. Hard cap 20,000 events per query - page with offset (1-based) if you hit it.

NASA APOD (note: this endpoint often takes 2-10s - set a generous timeout):

https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod?api_key={KEY}&date={YYYY-MM-DD}

{"date":"...","title":"...","explanation":"...","media_type":"image",
 "url":"https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/...jpg","hdurl":"..."}

Check media_type - on video days url is a YouTube embed, not an image.

Near-Earth asteroids:

https://api.nasa.gov/neo/rest/v1/feed?start_date={YYYY-MM-DD}&end_date={YYYY-MM-DD}&api_key={KEY}

Max 7-day window per call (400 above that). Shape: element_count, then near_earth_objects keyed by date, each object with name, is_potentially_hazardous_asteroid, estimated_diameter.meters.estimated_diameter_max, and close_approach_data[0].miss_distance.kilometers (a string - parse it).

Full-disk Earth image (keyless mirror):

https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/api/natural                       ← latest image list
https://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/natural/{yyyy}/{mm}/{dd}/png/{image}.png

List items carry image (basename) and date; split the date into the {yyyy}/{mm}/{dd} path parts and append {image}.png.

Deliverable

The fetched events/objects with human-readable UTC times, magnitudes/diameters with units, impact fields (alert, tsunami, hazardous flags) surfaced, and the exact URL used.

Do NOT use - reach for X instead

• SpaceX API (api.spacexdata.com) - fails TLS (HTTP 525), verified; the project is archived. Don't cite it as a data source.
• ISS position (api.open-notify.org / wheretheiss.at) - HTTP-only and timing out respectively, verified. No keyless ISS tracker ships in this pack; say so rather than pointing at a dead endpoint.
• Weather, storms, air quality - weather-climate (the USGS/NASA slot is rocks and space, not atmosphere).
• "Where is this quake's city?" enrichment - geo-places for reverse geocoding beyond the place string USGS already gives you.

Quality bar

• USGS filters ran server-side; no full-catalog downloads.
• Epoch milliseconds became UTC datetimes; [lon, lat] order was respected.
• Any loop against api.nasa.gov uses a real key, never DEMO_KEY.

Sourced and liveness-verified from the public-apis project (MIT).