ESA Portal BringsEurope’s Mars Adventureto Millions

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ESA Portal

C urrently read by more than 1.5 million external visitorsa month, the ESA Portal is now the leading source ofEuropean space news and information. Mars Express,

Europe’s first mission to Mars, brought unprecedented trafficto the ESA Portal, presenting the team that run it with thechallenge of dealing with a fourfold increase in visitors. Anew system put in place in time for the great Mars adventureguarantees fast round-the-clock access to the Portal fromaround the World.

About the PortalAn independent marketing study carried out in 1999showed that the public image of ESA was weak andfragmented. At that time NASA was better knownamong the European public than ESA. The Internet wasa logical choice as one of the key elements to boostESA’s visibility and strengthen the Agency’s image.Although ESA had already had a web presence sinceNovember 1993, a new project was started to create aEuropean online space magazine. The new ESACommunication Portal, www.esa.int, was launched on18 October 2000. In line with the recommendations ofthe study, its main objective is to increase awareness ofthe importance of space for Europe and its citizensamong the general public and the media.

With a coherent graphical ‘look and feel’, the Portalconveys a consistent image of ESA. The site is a dynamiconline magazine, with a news desk model, publishing at

Fulvio DriganiCommunication Department, ESA Directorate of ExternalRelations, ESRIN, Frascati, Italy

Jurgen ScholzInformation Systems Department, ESA Operations andInfrastructure Directorate, ESRIN, Frascati, Italy

Communication

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least one new article every day, with moreand more emphasis on multimedia elementssuch as graphics, video clips andanimations. The backbone of the ESA Portalis its ContentServer publishing system,allowing editors to concentrate on news,

What is Caching?

‘Caching’ basically means that a copy of the ESA Portal’s content is stored onthousands of other servers worldwide. These servers are close to the ‘edge of theInternet’, i.e. very well connected to the backbone network infrastructure. A userrequesting to see an ESA web page thereby no longer downloads this from thePortal’s server at ESRIN in Frascati (I), but from the closest and best availableserver. This is made possible with the support of a commercially availableContent Delivery Network and sophisticated worldwide Internet trafficmonitoring and management applications. As soon as any change is made on anypage of the Portal, it is almost instantly replicated on the network of servers.

This ‘whole-site-delivery’ technology relieves the load on the Agencyinfrastructure, helps to bypass common Internet bottlenecks, and at the sametime boosts the performance of the Portal experienced by the visitor in terms ofavailability and responsiveness.

As well as supporting peaks in traffic due to special events, this service solutionoffers a number of distinct advantages for the Agency’s website year round:- guaranteed worldwide fast delivery of the web pages even during peaks in

traffic, 24 hours a day, seven days a week- reduced infrastructure costs, since there is no need to upgrade servers,

hardware or the network- increased resilience against security threats- real-time on-demand reporting on network utilisation, total bandwidth, and

server response times- 24/7 availability of technical support staff at a network operations centre.

The ESA Communication Portal

The network infrastructure

ESA Portal access statistics, December 2000 to June 2003 – External visitors

content, and images, while guaranteeing aconsistent graphical house style.

In the three years since its launch, thenumber of visitors to the Portal has grownsteadily. From 140 000 visitors in Dec-ember 2000, by the end of 2001 the Portal

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VideoTalk, an exciting new multimedia feature that discusses thequestions that we hope will be answered by ESA’s pioneeringspace exploration

The web-cam image from ESOC was downloaded more than 1.6 million times in December 2003

was already attracting about 250 000visitors per month. This figure doubledagain in 2002, reaching 600 000 visitorsessions a month by summer 2003.

An active news promotion policy, as wellas partnerships with other media or webplayers, has played an important role in thesteady increase. Visitors are attracted bythe reliable flow of news and accuratebackground information, presented in aneasily understandable and coherent way.

The Launch of Mars ExpressOne of the biggest challenges that the ESAPortal team faces are the ‘special events’ –launches of spacecraft or astronauts orother high-profile events resulting in peaktraffic on the site. With the web beingincreasingly perceived as the ideal mediumfor communicating ‘space’ to the public,the launch of Mars Express in June 2003boosted the visitor sessions to a then-record of 70 000 visitors on a single day.

Monitoring the statistics, it was obviousthat contingency plans to handle suchpeaks in traffic were needed. On the day ofthe launch of Mars Express, the interestfrom the general public was so enormousthat the infrastructure hosting and servingthe web pages became overloaded andusers began to report problemsdownloading material from the Marspages. The available Internet bandwidthwas simply not sufficient to deal with thismassive interest.

It was clear that with the arrival of MarsExpress at the Red Planet, together withthe landings of the NASA rovers,worldwide interest in Mars was going toreach unprecedented levels. An immediatesolution was necessary. A straightforwardincrease in network bandwidth had to bediscarded for technical and cost reasons,because the real need was neither preciselyknown nor possible to estimate. Was it 10 Mbit/s, 100 Mbit/s, or even more? Byworking closely together, the Agency’sOnline Communication Section andInformation Systems Department identi-fied ‘caching’ of the content of the Portalworldwide as the best solution (seeaccompanying panel). After evaluation ofthe vendors available, one of the marketleaders was selected to provide this serviceunder contract to ESA.

Arriving at Mars!An additional challenge for the Portal teamwas that while there would not be hardnews every single day, this huge newaudience had to be kept ‘online’. To thisend, special Mars Express pages werecreated in close cooperation with the ESAScience Communication Service. The goalwas to have one ‘new(s) item’ every day,from 1 December until the arrival at Marson 25 December. These included images,graphics, animations, video clips,background information, news and pressreleases, interviews with lead scientists, aweb-cam image from the Control Room inESOC refreshed once per minute and, for

ESA Portal

Communication

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the first time, an exciting new multimediafeature called ‘VideoTalk’. For thecountdown to Christmas, these elementswere presented in the form of an adventcalendar – something new each day behindevery window.

The first peak in traffic was expected on19 December, with the separation of theBritish Beagle 2 lander from the motherspacecraft Mars Express, and so theintention was to activate the new cachingservice before that date. However, the firstblurry image of Mars taken by MarsExpress while still 5 million kilometresfrom its target, published late on 3December, brought such a big surge intraffic that activation of the caching servicehad to be brought forward by a week.

To verify the efficiency of the newcaching service an independent monitoringsystem was set up. The results werestartling – while on 4 December from earlymorning on, the average time required todownload the ESA Portal’s home pageincreased steadily from some 20 secondsto more than 40 seconds (against abenchmark value of not more than 8seconds), in the late afternoon, once thecache servers had taken over at 5 pm, thedownload time dropped to a ‘dream value’of very close to 1 second. At the sametime, the website’s availability (measuredfor 35 cities worldwide) increased from alow of 45% in, for example, Shanghai,Hong Kong, San Diego and Kansas City, to100% everywhere.

Coverage of the separation of Beaglefrom Mars Express on 19 December,including a live webcast from the ESOCControl Room, attracted another recordnumber for a single day with some 118 000external visitors. This record was soon tobe broken again by the arrival of MarsExpress at Mars on Christmas morning2003, with the added drama of waiting fornews about the Beagle lander. In all, 280 000 external visitors participated inlive web events and streaming – four timesthe number that had looked at the site onlaunch day! Traffic remained very highduring the period up to New Year’s Eve.

In total, the ESA Communication Portalhad served almost 3.4 million visitorsduring the month of December – almost

Average time in seconds taken to download the ESA Communication Portal Home Page between 6 pm on 3 December and 5 pm on 4 December 2003, prior to activation of the caching service

Average time in seconds taken to download the ESA Communication Portal Home Page between 9 am on 4 December and 8 am on 5 December 2003. Note the drop in download time after 5 pm when the caching service was activated

The traffic surge after the publication of the first Mars Express images

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ten times more than during the same periodthe year before.

Let the Flash Crowds In!In ‘Flash Crowd’, a science fiction story ofthe 1970s, the author describes theconsequences of instantaneous (and free)teleportation, which allowed tens ofthousands of people worldwide to flockalmost instantaneously to the scene ofanything interesting that was happening. Inweb terms, a similar phenomenon occurswhen a site catches the attention of many‘surfers’ and attracts sudden surges oftraffic, often leading to an overload of thesite’s Internet bandwidth or servers.

Several such ‘flash crowds’ hit theAgency’s Communication Portal at the endof January 2004. The first came with thepublication of the first image of Marstaken by Mars Express on 19 January – anall-time high of 310 000 visitor sessions ona single day, on 20 January.

The discovery of water on Mars,officially announced during a PressConference at ESOC on 23 January, alsoattracted some 240 000 visitors, with peaktraffic continuing all weekend. This eventwas particularly ‘bandwidth heavy’, due tothe availability of multimedia material,which led to traffic peaks exceeding 200Mbit/s immediately following theannouncement, almost a hundred times theconsumption only a few weeks earlier.Although more than 1.1 Terabytes of datawere provided to users during this ‘hot’weekend, no service interruptions ordecreases in performance were reported.

‘Brilliant!’Today the ESA Communication Portal, as anonline magazine for the general public andmedia, has become the leading source ofEuropean space information. In the pastyears, both the number and the variety ofsites picking up ESA’s news have steadilyincreased. While in the early years onlyspecialist sites such as Space.com referred tothe ESA Portal, today the BBC, CNN, Yahoo,Reuters, USA Today, National Geographic,and the Discovery Channel regularly pick upstories from the ESA Portal.

ESA Portal

Network bandwidth utilisation after the discovery of water on Mars

Average worldwide site performance and availability during the weekend of 23/26 January 2004

ESA Portal access statistics, June 2003 to January 2004 – External visitors

Communication

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The Sunday Times (UK) on 4 January2004 "reached out to the brilliant MarsExpress website", calling it "enthralling…,rich in contributions from many sources,… and an object lesson in how scientistscan harness the web to involve the generalpublic, while also reaching those whoseinterest is more serious."

Even after the Mars storm died down,traffic to the ESA Portal has consistentlyremained above 1.5 million externalvisitors a month, with smooth delivery ofweb pages continuing to be guaranteed bythe new caching system. Next Christmaspromises to be no less exciting, with thearrival at Saturn of Cassini/Huygens, andthe release of ESA’s Huygens probe toparachute down to explore the surface ofthe planet’s mysterious moon Titan.

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Useful Internet links:

ESA Communication Portal http://www.esa.intMars Express pages http://www.esa.int/marsexpressCassini-Huygens pages http://saturn.esa.int

CNN, Heute Journal, Le Monde and La Repubblica are regular customers of the ESA Portal