App review: official NASA app

The main screen of the app is a listing of all current NASA missions (space shuttle, space station, Ares rocket, and Mars rovers) that you can click on to get more information. Each mission page has a short description of the mission plus a cool timer of how long the mission has been active. For example, as of this writing, the International Space Station has been in orbit for 4034 days, 9 hours, 53 minutes. The top of each mission page has several tabs that you can tap on to access other relevant information like photos, videos, and updates for that mission. The photos page is well-implemented, taking advantage of the iPhone’s tilting function to display full-screen photos. There is also a button at the top of the screen to email the current image to yourself or a friend.

It’s a similar situation with the videos page. There is a list of a variety of videos pertaining to the mission, ranging from mission updates to launch videos. Tapping on one launches that video in the iPhone’s YouTube app, automatically returning to the NASA app once the video finishes playing.

The list of updates for each mission is essentially a combination of all recent Twitter updates relating to that mission. Fortunately, the list of Twitter updates is pre-filtered to remove irrelevant posts from that feed — for example, the space shuttle feed only has shuttle-related posts from the main NASA feed, not all posts. These are generally updated in bursts whenever something happens with a mission, and can be a useful way of keeping track of a launch or landing.

When applicable, the most interesting tab of all displays the location of a spacecraft superimposed on a Google map of the world, along with the path it will take. While not particularly useful, it’s always fun to see if the International Space Station might show up in the sky above you sometime in the near future.

There are also NASA-wide feeds available, which are pretty much the same information with a wider focus. Instead of mission-specific images you get NASA’s Image of the Day and Astronomy Picture of the Day feeds. Likewise, the updates can be filtered to include any NASA-run Twitter feeds you want to see.

The main issue with the NASA app is that it doesn’t offer very much that couldn’t be done with a well-designed web app. Although the information available is presented quite nicely, there’s not much that you couldn’t find by browsing nasa.gov in Safari. However, this app does deserve credit for presenting that information in a clear, quick-to-load format. I’d like to see a little bit more in the way of space-related science news, but in the meantime if you’re looking for a solid, frequently-updated news app that focuses on space issues, you can’t do much better than the NASA app.