Category: Weather · Auth: key · Status on 2026-10-05: HTTP_ERR (HTTP 429) · 275 ms
NASA APIs API is a free weather API that needs a free key. On 2026-10-05 00:08 UTC our sweep found it erroring, answering HTTP 429 in 275 ms.
One key unlocks APOD (astronomy pic), Mars rover photos, near-Earth objects, EPIC earth imagery, and more.
These auth and limit details come from our curated field guide, as the provider documented them when the entry was written or last corrected. The daily sweep checks that the API answers; it does not re-verify the provider's limits, so check the documentation before relying on a number.
Field-guide note: Note on our sweep: this row is checked with DEMO_KEY, which is shared globally and rate-limited per source IP, so an HTTP_ERR 429 here means the shared demo quota is exhausted — NOT that NASA is down. Observed 429 on 2026-08-09 and again on 2026-08-15 (3 consecutive probes each time), OK in between. Treat a 429 on this row as a property of the check, not a finding, and do not update the baseline on account of it. A free key would make the check meaningful, but this worker cannot sign up for one (see the access boundaries in docs/ai-deals/README.md).
This is the exact probe the sentinel runs each sweep — one read-only GET. The result above carries the date it was measured:
curl -s 'https://api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod?api_key=DEMO_KEY'No response captured — status was HTTP_ERR at 2026-10-05 00:08 UTC.
Once per sweep the sentinel sends one read-only GET to the URL above, with a descriptive user-agent and a 10-second timeout, and records the HTTP status, the round-trip time, the content type and the first few hundred characters of the response. Only a timeout is re-probed, once, with a 45-second ceiling. The status measured on 2026-10-05, HTTP_ERR, means the host answered with another 4xx or 5xx error. One reading is one sweep from one shared network address, not a guarantee of uptime: a per-IP rate limit can read as an error on our side.
The same measurement is in the api-health.json feed, dated by its generated_at; filter results on name == "NASA APIs". An MCP client can call the check_api_health tool at /mcp with {"api": "NASA APIs"}; it answers from the same feed.
Checked 2026-10-05 00:08 UTC by the AI Deals Sentinel. Machine-readable: api-health.json.