◐ Colophon
About the Atlas
The single navigable destination for "I want to understand all of NASA Earth observation." Structured data on every active and recent satellite, every key CMR dataset across all 12 DAACs, a library of grounded science questions with working code, and cross-dataset fusion recipes.
Built solo with Claude Code as an independent project — not affiliated with NASA, like Hannah Ritchie's Our World in Data is to climate. Content is licensed CC-BY-4.0; code is MIT. Sources are cited per page.
What this is not
- Not a chat app. Chat apps go stale; literacy stays useful.
- Not an MCP server. MCP servers are commodity by mid-2026.
- Not a science paper. Papers are gated; atlases are open.
The content model
| Satellite | instruments → measurements → datasets; launch, status, orbit |
|---|---|
| Dataset | short name, theme, resolution, cadence, swath, formats, DAAC, snippet |
| Question | plain-language goal → datasets + code template + expected output + caveats |
| Recipe | cross-dataset fusion pattern with auth / format / temporal-alignment notes |
| Glossary | visual concept explainer |
| DAAC | one of NASA's 12 archive centers — what they curate, format quirks |
How it's built
- Astro — static-first generator with content collections + MDX.
- MDX content in
src/content/; each page cites primary sources with alast_verifieddate. - Live islands — the home globe, Explore map, Live dashboard, Connections graph, and Tracks all run client-side against NASA GIBS / CMR / Celestrak.