Case Study: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory achieves global, scalable live streaming for the Curiosity landing with Amazon CloudFront

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Customer Case Study

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed to broadcast Curiosity’s high‑profile Mars landing and ongoing mission updates to a global audience while supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers and hundreds of gigabits/second of traffic—requirements that exceeded its on‑premises infrastructure. To meet these availability, scalability, and latency challenges, JPL adopted cloud services including Amazon CloudFront for global content delivery as part of an AWS‑based streaming and web hosting solution.

Using Amazon CloudFront alongside EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, Route 53, S3, CloudWatch, and CloudFormation, the vendor helped JPL design and deploy a live video streaming and web architecture in just weeks. The solution provisioned stacks capable of ~25 Gbps each, scaled to handle hundreds of Gbps and hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, reduced deployment time from months to weeks, lowered latency for international visitors, and enabled automated image processing to increase scientists’ productive time—demonstrating clear, measurable improvement in performance and scalability provided by Amazon CloudFront and the AWS stack.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory