Computer users can now sail across Martian landscapes or spin Jupiter around like a top, thanks to the latest version of NASA鈥檚 World Wind software.
If those trips do not satisfy, users can also scan the heavens, take a trip around Venus and Jupiter鈥檚 moons and end with a dive into the Earth鈥檚 oceans. It certainly entertained this space reporter for a rather large part of an afternoon.
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NASA released the first version of World Wind in 2005. Since then, about 10 million people have .
But World Wind is more than just pretty pictures. NASA is using the program to plan future planetary missions, while the US National Guard intends to use it to help respond to domestic disasters.
Cosmic zoom
The ability to zoom in on spiral galaxies and distant star clusters comes via data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a huge data-gathering project that aims to map one-quarter of the sky.
World Wind also offers free tours of the Moon using 1.8 million pictures taken by the Clementine spacecraft in 1994 at a resolution of about 100 metres per pixel.
The resolution on Earth is even better. In parts of some cities, including Seattle, Washington DC and San Francisco, users can see colour objects as small as 0.25 metres across. 鈥淵ou can go so close you can see if they cut the grass that day,鈥� says World Wind programme manager Patrick Hogan, based at NASA鈥檚 Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, US.
Hogan鈥檚 favorite World Wind location is Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, California, US. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like an Ansel Adams photograph,鈥� Hogan told 快猫短视频.
Open source
World Wind differs from another popular program, Google Earth, in that users can contribute data sets to World Wind and its code is open source. But Google Earth uses data from commercial satellites, giving users access to more data on our home planet.
NASA teamed up with Google in March 2006 to let people surf across the Martian surface using images from the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey orbiters.
World Wind also uses data from those spacecraft and highlights Martian landmarks, so users can check out the face on Mars or rover landing sites for themselves. On Mars and other rocky planets, users can get an extra buzz by hitting the 9 key to exaggerate the landscape vertically, making it stand out all the more.
A new version of World Wind written in Java code is expected to be released in September 2006.
