Mars Rover Photos API listed as archived, community-maintained replacement available

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Assessment

Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
68/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start by reviewing the Mars Rover Photos API entry in apis.json and the corresponding api.nasa.gov documentation page. Confirm how archived services and community-maintained alternatives are represented, then update the listing or note to reference the maintained replacement and verify the rendered documentation.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The Mars Rover Photos API is currently listed as archived on api.nasa.gov, linking to https://github.com/corincerami/mars-photo-api, which the original maintainer stepped away from after several years.

I've built and have been actively maintaining an open source, free replacement that mirrors the original API's functionality and has continued to receive updates:

Live API: https://rovers.nebulum.one/
GitHub repo: https://github.com/nebulum-one/mars-photo-api

The documentation has also been expanded since the original, including clarifying which cameras produce color versus black and white images.

Since the current listing points to an archived project with no ongoing maintenance, I wanted to flag this here in case the apis.json listing could be updated to point to a maintained alternative, or the page could note that a community-maintained option exists.

For context, I also emailed hq-open-innovation@mail.nasa.gov about this a few months ago but haven't heard back, so I wanted to raise it here as well in case this repo is a better channel for this kind of update.

Happy to answer any questions or provide more info if useful.

Dominant language
SCSS
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Forks
140
Avg merge
2h 30m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

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