Important Features of the NASA World Wind
NASA World Wind is one of the virtual globe programs that offer satellite imagery from NASA, USGS, and many other resources. The most important thing about NASA is that it does not charge anything for this. Moreover, to satellite imagery it also provides numerous types of maps and information to its users. The goal of NASA World Wind is to increase the awareness about the research work done by NASA among the public.
For topographical reasons, NASA World Wind makes use of the DEM (Digital Elevation Model) data. NASA has collected this data at the time of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Because of this, NASA World Wind can display all the important landmarks such as the Mount Everest or Grand Canyon in the form of three-dimensional models.
The first version of NASA World Wind was released in the year 2004 and NASA released it, itself. The latest version i.e. the version 1.4 was released on February 14th 2007. The members of the open source community developed it. Most of these members had worked or have been working for NASA World Wind Central or Free Earth Foundation. NASA World Wind offers imageries and data of different worlds to you on your desktop in the comfort of your own house. Earth is not the only one; the others worlds included in it are Mars, Moon, Jupiter and Venus. It also offers SDSS imagery such as the galactic imagery and stars in our Universe. You can select the one of your choice that you wish to view from the file menu.
With an intention to help you while observing the images, NASA World Wind provides you with the place names, coordinate data such as latitude and longitude lines, and many other locational criteria’s. NASA World Wind enables the common user to browse through the geospatial data and maps using internet. The imagery features sun shading and atmospheric scattering. All this makes the imagery appear very much real.
NASA World Wind offers a very much-detailed imagery. These imagery details differ from region to region. The resolution in metro areas in U.S. is high enough that shows people walking on the streets. Their shadows too are clearly noticeable. The resolution reduces as we go out of the metropolitan areas. The countries other than U.S. have a resolution of 15 meters/ pixel. Moreover, high-resolution data from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has been incorporated now in the NASA World Wind.
NASA World Wind is very simple to use as it is designed specifically for a common user. It features a graphical user interface and thus anybody who has an access to internet can use it. The world you are observing is displayed as an interactive object that can be grabbed and rotated or tilted, etc, for you to see it in all the directions and to change the focus from one location to another. You can also zoom in or zoom out of any place by scrolling the mouse wheel in forward or reverse directions.
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