NASA MCP

A local stdio MCP server that turns NASA's public APIs into compact, assistant-friendly tools instead of pouring raw telemetry into the context window.

Tools

• nasa_daily_brief — APOD, recent space-weather notices, current Earth events, and the latest full-disc Earth image in one fault-tolerant call.

• nasa_apod — Astronomy Picture of the Day by date or random sample.

• nasa_search_media — search NASA's image, video, and audio library.

• nasa_media_asset — retrieve downloadable files for a NASA media ID.

• nasa_earth_events — current/recent wildfires, storms, volcanoes, icebergs, floods, and other EONET events.

• nasa_space_weather — DONKI notifications or event feeds such as flares, CMEs, and geomagnetic storms.

• nasa_epic_earth — recent DSCOVR/EPIC full-disc Earth imagery with direct image URLs.

• nasa_power_daily — historical daily weather, solar-resource, and agricultural data for a latitude/longitude in compact columnar series.

• nasa_power_climatology — monthly and annual climate normals for a location using NASA POWER's standard 2001–2020 baseline.

NASA POWER tools provide weather, solar, and agriculture presets, or up to ten explicitly selected parameter codes. The agriculture preset defaults to POWER's AG community; other requests default to RE, with SB also available when community-specific units are needed. Daily requests are limited to 366 calendar days and 2,000 parameter-day values, radiation parameters begin on 1984-01-01, and responses clearly identify the data as historical rather than a forecast.

Related MCP server: NASA MCP Server

Setup

npm install
npm test
npm run smoke

The smoke test always exercises the six keyless live tools. It exercises APOD, DONKI, and the combined daily brief only when a registered NASA_API_KEY is configured; degraded API-keyed sections do not receive a false green.

NASA_API_KEY is optional. Without it, the server uses NASA's DEMO_KEY (30 requests/hour and 50/day per IP). EONET, EPIC, NASA POWER, and the NASA media library are keyless. For regular use, create a free key at https://api.nasa.gov/ and expose it as NASA_API_KEY in the MCP server environment.

Run

NASA_API_KEY=... node dist/index.js

The server speaks MCP over stdio. Logs go to stderr; stdout is reserved for protocol frames.

Data behavior

• Date ranges, numeric limits, enum values, and extra arguments are strictly validated.

• Free-text and ID inputs are length-limited; outputs are normalized, truncated, and capped to avoid context flooding.

• Requests are restricted to fixed NASA HTTPS origins, use 20-second timeouts, and retry transient 5xx responses once.

• nasa_daily_brief returns partial results when one upstream API is unavailable, including shared DEMO_KEY throttling.

• NASA API keys are redacted from returned source URLs; rate-limit headers are surfaced when available.

Sources: NASA Open APIs, NASA Image and Video Library, EONET v3, DONKI, EPIC, and NASA POWER.