NASA
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) provides a suite of public APIs at api.nasa.gov offering access to space, Earth science, and aeronautics data. Key APIs include Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), Mars Rover Photos, Near Earth Object Web Service (NeoWs), DONKI space weather events, EPIC Earth imagery, and the NASA Image and Video Library. All APIs are free and accessible with an API key.
Real signal across most facets with visible, nameable gaps — the contract exists but is thin, or the portal is good while governance and commercial terms are absent.
API Evangelist profiles NASA the way a machine reads it — 42 machine-readable artifacts across 9 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.
Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — NASA scores 51.6/100 (developing), with a separate agent-readiness read of 71/100 (agent native). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.
Kin Score
This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance.
Kin Score
How this is scored →scored 2026-07-27 · rubric v0.5
How we profile NASA
Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for NASA. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.
APIs 9
Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.
Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.
NASA Asset API
The Asset API from NASA — 1 operation(s) for asset.
NASA Captions API
The Captions API from NASA — 1 operation(s) for captions.
NASA DONKI API
The DONKI API from NASA — 8 operation(s) for donki.
NASA EPIC API
The EPIC API from NASA — 5 operation(s) for epic.
NASA Mars Photos API
The Mars Photos API from NASA — 3 operation(s) for mars photos.
NASA Metadata API
The Metadata API from NASA — 1 operation(s) for metadata.
NASA Neo API
The Neo API from NASA — 3 operation(s) for neo.
NASA Planetary API
The Planetary API from NASA — 1 operation(s) for planetary.
NASA Search API
The Search API from NASA — 1 operation(s) for search.
Scroll within the panel for all 9 ·
Open Collections 6
Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.
Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) API
OPEN COLLECTIONNASA EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) API
OPEN COLLECTIONNASA Mars Rover Photos API
OPEN COLLECTIONNASA Image and Video Library API
OPEN COLLECTIONNASA NeoWs (Near Earth Object Web Service) API
OPEN COLLECTIONArazzo Workflows 7
Real integrations are rarely a single call. Arazzo describes the multi-step sequences — auth, then create, then confirm — so both a human and an agent can follow the choreography, not just the endpoints.
Multi-step API workflows described with the Arazzo specification.
NASA APOD Daily Digest
Pull the Astronomy Picture of the Day and enrich it with related assets from the NASA Image and Video Library.
ARAZZONASA DONKI Notification Triage
Poll DONKI space weather notifications and branch to the matching event endpoint for the detail the alert omits.
ARAZZONASA DONKI Space Weather Event Chain
Walk one space weather window end to end — solar flare, coronal mass ejection, CME analysis, interplanetary shock, geomagnetic storm.
ARAZZONASA EPIC Earth Imagery Retrieval
List the dates EPIC actually has imagery for, then pull both natural and enhanced color metadata for one of them.
ARAZZONASA Mars Rover Photo Harvest
Read a rover's mission manifest to find a sol that actually has photos, then harvest that sol's images.
ARAZZONASA Media Asset Retrieval
Search the NASA Image and Video Library, then resolve the downloadable files, metadata, and captions for a match.
ARAZZONASA Near Earth Object Close Approach Analysis
Page the asteroid catalog, look up a specific near-Earth object, and pull every other object approaching on the same date.
ARAZZOScroll within the panel for all 7 ·
MCP Servers 1
Model Context Protocol servers expose these APIs directly to AI agents. We profile them because agent-native access is the fastest-growing way this provider's capabilities actually get used.
Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.
nasa-mcp.yml
MCP SERVERPricing Plans 1
Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the six things the Kin Score reads for commercial clarity.
Published pricing tiers and plan structures.
Nasa Plans Pricing
PLANSRate Limits 1
Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.
Documented rate limits and quota policies.
Nasa Rate Limits
RATE LIMITSFinOps 1
Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.
Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.
Nasa Finops
FINOPSSemantic Vocabularies 1
JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.
JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.
Nasa Context
JSON-LDSpectral Rules 1
Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.
NASA API Rules
SPECTRALJSON Schema 10
Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.
Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.
APOD Image
JSON SCHEMARover Camera
JSON SCHEMAClose Approach
JSON SCHEMACoronal Mass Ejection
JSON SCHEMAEPIC Image
JSON SCHEMAGeomagnetic Storm
JSON SCHEMANear Earth Object
JSON SCHEMAMars Rover Photo
JSON SCHEMAMars Rover
JSON SCHEMASolar Flare
JSON SCHEMAScroll within the panel for all 10 ·
Security Posture 3
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.
Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.
Agentic Access 1
An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.
Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.
Resources
Every other property we hold for NASA — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.
Get Started 2
Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call
Documentation 1
Reference material describing how the API behaves
Agent Surfaces 4
MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs
Design & Contract 12
Pagination, idempotency, versioning, errors, and events
Scroll within the panel for all 12 ·
Build 2
SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with
Access & Security 3
Authentication, authorization, and security posture
Company 3
The organization behind the API
Other 6
Properties that don't map to a standard resource type
← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/nasa · machine-readable index on apis.io