NASA ECLIPSES EXPECTATIONS

NASA is committed to providing the best educational resources for its programs as well as its live event coverage. As a leader in technological innovation in the federal space, NASA was focused on ensuring this historic, once-in-a-lifetime eclipse event, could be shared by millions across the world through a high-performance solution. We are very honored to be a part of such a driven and innovative team and to have played a role in this monumental event.

On a day where millions experienced a once in a lifetime total solar eclipse, NASA’s tireless efforts to provide the public with a seamless live-streaming experience of eclipse feeds from across the country resulted in one of the largest web-based events U.S. government history.

NASA’s coverage of the eclipse was a homerun in the IT world and is a testament to the Agency’s commitment to technological excellence in everything they do in support of both their scientific endeavors and their duty to share their experiences with the world, showing that IT collaboration and partnership in the federal government is not only possible but wildly successful.

On Monday, NASA surpassed expectations, streaming 18 live feeds from across the country, including high-altitude balloon feeds, telescope views and shots from various aircraft situated along the path of totality from Oregon to South Carolina. Just as impressive as the content being served was the amount of web-traffic NASA.gov received, recording over 30 million visitors over its 6 hours of coverage, resulting in over 80 million page views and at peak levels, sustained over 1.5 million concurrent users – all of which are record-shattering statistics for the Agency.

Livestreaming is no easy feat. An architecture in which supports millions who are livestreaming is even harder. Not being able to accurately guess or predict just how many viewers would tune in and then planning for an architecture to support an unknown amount is unthinkable, until Monday.

"We were in uncharted territory. We predicted that this would be our most watched event, but we didn’t really know to what level,” Nagaraja said. “Mobomo had the arduous task of testing [the site] to the limits that they possibly could and then being able to build something that could scale to the level above that depending on what happened on eclipse day."

Crucial to the success of the eclipse coverage was ensuring that NASA.gov sustained high performance levels under considerable levels of users visiting the website, which required significant planning and collaboration between NASA and members of the WESTPrime contract team, who manage both application development and the backend cloud-based infrastructure.

In addition to developing the main Eclipse Live page and an interactive solar eclipse map tracker, which allowed users to view the real-time progression of the eclipse across the continent, we were also tasked with stress-testing the website and its backend infrastructure to ensure it would perform at a high level under significant increases in user traffic. It was impossible to know just how many users would tune in to watch the event which made it very difficult to test.

Mobomo was responsible for building the backend of the web page and created the interactive graphic that tracked the eclipse in real time which allowed for people to find the best viewing time for their geographic location. The biggest unknown was user testing, we were able to bring on a consultant to run a stress test on the site and simulate millions of people using the site at once. At the same time the consultant ran the test, Mobomo team had a few people head to the site to see how it felt. He didn’t tell them that at that very moment about over a million users were also on the site doing the same thing.