NASA Connecting the World Together
National Aeronautics and Space Administration well known as NASA recently released a program World Wind, which is a virtual globe like Google Earth. It uses the satellite images and aerial views, photography, topographic maps to attain a virtual 3-Dimensional model of any planet. NASA first released world Wind in the year 2004. Later an open source community called World Wind Central developed it. Many versions were released after that. The latest version 1.4 was premiered on 14th February 2007. This program can be operated using your personal computers.
The most remarkable fact about world wind is that it is a free software and any person can have an easy access to it. It is user-friendly software and no special training is required to run it. This program encompasses a list of various “worlds” that can be viewed online. World here simply means planets like Jupiter, Mars, Moon, Venus and Earth.
Pictures and topographic images that are assembled through the satellites are used to form a 3D Virtual Globe. This globe resembles to the respective planet and using some commands one can rotate, zoom in and out in any desired direction of the globe. It gives almost real views of any individual planet and by viewing it , you will virtually feel as if you are visiting that planet.
World Wind is compiled with many such features. One can see the political boundaries, latitude, longitude lines and many other location criteria’s. It is affirmed that world wind features about five million place names and allow one to browse maps and geospatial data, import ESRI shape files and kml/kmz files on internet with the help of OGC’s WMS servers. This way anyone can deliver his or her data.
World wind applies digital elevation model also known as DEM, data collected through NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. With the help of this information one is able to view topographic features of some of the planet Earth’s natural wonders like Grand Canyon in a 3-Dimensional form. It is also equipped with other exciting features such as 3D ENGINE, SRTM, GLOBE, blue marble, animated earth, MODIS, place names, LANDSAT 7, Country and State borders, landmark set, visual tools etc .These features are as follows.
VISUAL TOOLS: this feature allows the viewer to use the data that comes with visual guides like latitude and longitude lines, extremely precise coordinate data. This is very useful in routing while you are travelling.BLUE MARBLE: The term blue marble refers to our planet earth. It is a feature that gives spectacular true color images of the same. This information is collected from the well-known satellites like TERRA and MODIS. It can be seen at 1km/pixel resolution.
LANDMARK SET: This is very interesting feature of World Wind. It allows you to visit the landmarks on earth virtually as it contents 3-Dimensional models of the popular landmarks. Many people use world wind for business purposes by adding data to their own data and making it available online by the private websites and blogs.
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