Case Study: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory achieves global, scalable live streaming for the Curiosity mission with Amazon Web Services

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Customer Case Study

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) needed to share Curiosity’s high‑profile Mars landing and ongoing mission data with a global audience, but lacked the web and streaming infrastructure to reliably serve hundreds of thousands of concurrent visitors and live video during the critical descent and landing. The challenge was to ensure availability, scalability and performance for real‑time images, video and metadata without months of custom build‑out.

JPL used Amazon Web Services to rapidly design, test and deploy a globally distributed web and live‑streaming architecture—combining EC2, CloudFront, Route 53, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFormation, S3, RDS, SWF and monitoring—to provision stacks capable of handling tens of gigabits per second and scale on demand. The cloud solution was built in weeks, delivered reliable global streaming and content delivery during the landing, automated image processing from Mars, and let scientists get data faster while avoiding large capital infrastructure costs.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Tom Soderstrom

JPL IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer