Spirit Landing Breaks All Previous NASA Internet Records
According to information received from NASA, this weekend’s landing of the Spirit rover on Mars drew an unprecedented audience for NASA on the Internet.
Some statistics:
48,000 people were watching NASA TV webcast as Spirit landed. To date, 223,000 people have tuned into the NASA TV Webcast at some point or another to watch Spirit-related webcasts.
In the 48 hours ending at 11 am EST Monday, NASA had 513 million hits and 86 million pages downloaded. CNN.com averages about 30 million hits per day – 80 million hits during breaking news.
For all of 2003, NASA had 2.8 billion hits and 287 million page views. In just 48 hours, NASA has seen more than half a billion hits.
Excluding February, an average day for NASA in 2003 was 867,000 page views and 8.3 million hits.
Biggest 24-hour periods in NASA Internet history:
- Spirit Landing (Jan. 3-4, 2004): 225 million hits
- Loss of Columbia (Feb. 1, 2003): 75 million hits
- Mars Polar Lander attempted landing (Dec. 3, 1999): 69 million hits
- Mars Pathfinder (July 9, 1997; 1st business day after landing): 47 million hits
