NASA World Wind Introduction
NASA World Wind is one of the virtual globe programs, which provide satellite imagery from NASA, USGS, and other sources. The important thing is that it does charge anything for this. In addition to satellite imagery, it also provides a number of different types of maps, and information as well. The aim of NASA World Wind was to increase awareness about the research and work done by NASA.
The first version of NASA World Wind came out in the year 2004 and NASA itself released it. The latest version i.e. 1.4 was released on February 14, 2007. It was developed mainly by the members of open source community. Most of these members had worked or have been working for NASA World Wind Central or Free Earth Foundation.
NASA World Wind provides imagery and information of different worlds. Earth is not the only one. The others worlds included are Mars, Moon, Jupiter (along with its four satellites Lo, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa), and Venus. It also provides SDSS imagery i.e. galactic imagery and stars in our Universe. You can choose the one which you want view from the file menu.
Using NASA World Wind is very simple as it is designed for a common user. It has graphical user interface and so anybody who is able to use internet can use it. The world or planet that you are viewing is displayed as an interactive object, which you can grab and rotate; tilt, etc, in order to change the focus from one location to another. You can also zoom in or out of any place with scrolling the mouse wheel in forward or reverse directions or other simple options.
In order to aid you when viewing the imagery NASA World Wind also provides place names, coordinate data like latitude and longitude lines, and many other location criteria. The data is displayed depending on the location. NASA World Wind actually provides the general users the ability to browse through the geospatial data and maps using internet. The OGC’s WMS servers play an important role in doing this.
One of the features of NASA World Wind is the support for .X i.e. DirectX 3D polygon mesh which makes the imagery very attractive. Moreover, the imagery also features sun shading and atmospheric scattering as well. All this makes the imagery appear very much real.
The imagery that NASA World Wind offers is a very much-detailed one. The details vary from region to region. The resolution in metro areas in US is high enough to show people walking on the streets. Even their shadows are clearly visible. The resolution decreases as we go out of the metropolitan areas. The countries other than US have a resolution of 15 meters per pixel. Also high-resolution data from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth has been incorporated in NASA World Wind.
For topographical purposes, NASA World Wind uses the DEM i.e. digital elevation model data, which has been collected by NASA during its Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Because of this NASA World Wind can display the important landmarks like the Mount Everest or Grand Canyon in the form of three-dimensional models.
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