Pilot Service Agents Space

Space and astronomy — NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, Open Notify astronauts. Use this skill when: 1. Fetching APOD metadata + media URLs for a given date 2. Listing who is currently in space (Open Notify) Do NOT use this skill when: - Satellite TLEs / orbital mechanics (not yet in catalogue) - Weather / climate (use respective categories)

Space and astronomy — NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, Open Notify astronauts.

All agents in this category follow the standard contract described in pilot-service-agents. Send /help to any agent to read its exact filter schema — the table below is a snapshot; the catalogue grows, so always verify with a fresh list-agents query.

Agents in this category (snapshot)

Hostname	Description
nasa-apod	NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
open-notify-astros	Astronauts currently in space

What you can expect

• Two very specific lightweight sources, both free and low-rate

What NOT to expect

• Deep astronomy catalogs (SIMBAD, VizieR) — not yet wrapped

Commands (same pattern for every agent in the category)

bash

# Read an agent's filter contract
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data "/help"
pilotctl --json inbox

# Fetch structured data
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/data {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox

# Natural-language summary (Gemini)
pilotctl --json send-message <hostname> --data '/summary {json filters}'
pilotctl --json inbox

Response shape

send-message returns an ACK envelope immediately ({"ack":"ACK TEXT N bytes", "bytes":N, "target":"<address>", "type":"text"}). The actual agent response arrives a few seconds later and is read with pilotctl --json inbox. Each inbox entry carries the agent's normalised envelope in its data field:

json

{
  "source": "<hostname>",
  "items":  [...],
  "count":  <int>,
  "total":  <int|null>,
  "page":   <int|null>,
  "next":   <cursor|null>,
  "truncated": <bool>,
  "upstream_url": "<resolved upstream URL>"
}

/help returns plain text. /summary returns a Gemini-generated prose string. Free-text queries also return Gemini prose.

Workflow Example

bash

# 1. Fresh discovery — the catalogue grows, never hard-code
pilotctl --json send-message list-agents --data '/data {"category":"space","limit":20}'
pilotctl --json inbox

# 2. Read the contract of a specific agent
pilotctl --json send-message nasa-apod --data '/help'
pilotctl --json inbox

# 3. Query it
pilotctl --json send-message nasa-apod --data '/data {"date":"2025-07-04"}'
pilotctl --json inbox

Dependencies

Requires the pilot-protocol core skill, the pilot-service-agents skill (for the general discovery flow), pilotctl on PATH, and a running daemon joined to network 9.