I am trying to use curl to retrieve subscription data from your server.  I have modified my original line in my script to now be:

curl --sslv3 -d "subID=854&addurl=1&results_as_file=1" https://oceandata.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/search/file_search.cgi

I have tried the parameters --sslv2 and --tlsv1 as well.

The error message I get is: curl: (35) Unknown SSL protocol error in connection to oceandata.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov:443

The version of curl I am running is:
curl 7.15.5 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.15.5 OpenSSL/0.9.8b zlib/1.2.3 libidn/0.6.5
Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap http file https ftps
Features: GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz

Can you tell me what I might be doing wrong and/or if my version of curl is a new enough version?

Thanks,

Mark

Your curl is using a too old openssl library, which will likely casue problems for python 2.7 as well.  See Sean's post. 

My lab has RHEL 5.11 with a somewhat newer curl version with the same openssl 0.9.8b version.  This does not work with the new https URL's.

$ /usr/bin/curl --version
curl 7.47.0 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.47.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8b zlib/1.2.3 c-ares/1.12.0 libidn/1.32 libssh2/1.6.0
Protocols: dict file ftp ftps gopher http https imap imaps ldap ldaps pop3 pop3s rtsp scp sftp smb smbs smtp smtps telnet tftp
Features: AsynchDNS IDN IPv6 Largefile GSS-API Kerberos SPNEGO NTLM NTLM_WB SSL libz UnixSockets Metalink
$ /usr/bin/openssl ciphers -tls -v 'HIGH:!ADH:!MD5:@STRENGTH' | egrep "ECDHE-ECDSA-CHACHA20-POLY1305|ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384|ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256|ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-SHA384|ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-SHA256"
----no news is bad news ---