Science & Math · head-to-head
NASA vs USGS Earthquake Hazards Program
NASA's Open APIs give programmatic access to imagery and data from missions across the agency — the Astronomy Picture of the Day, Mars rover photos, near-Earth object tracking, and Earth-imagery archives among them. A free registered key raises the shared DEMO_KEY's 30-requests/hour limit to 1,000 requests/hour. All endpoints return JSON.
The USGS Earthquake Hazards Program's FDSNWS Event Web Service is a keyless REST API for querying the agency's global earthquake catalog by region, time window, magnitude, or depth, returning real-time and historical seismic event data. Requests default to QuakeML XML but can also return GeoJSON, CSV, or KML via a format parameter, and the whole service is free and unauthenticated, run directly by the federal government.
| NASA | USGS Earthquake Hazards Program | |
|---|---|---|
| Authentication | None | None |
| Pricing | free | free |
| Formats | JSON | JSON, XML, CSV |
| CORS | yes | yes |
| HTTPS | Yes | Yes |
USGS Earthquake Hazards Program supports 3 response formats, while NASA offers fewer — pick USGS Earthquake Hazards Program for more integration flexibility.