NASA World Wind over view
Is an earth browsing program from NASA. It provides it as an open source program and so anybody can download and use it. It is designed to run on the computers having Microsoft window as an operating system. The prominent features of NASA World Wind include imagery from NASA and USGS satellite. The imagery is of different types as satellite imagery, topographic maps, aerial photography, 3D models of earth and other planets from the solar system.
NASA World Wind was released in the year 2004. However, after that some more advanced versions have been released by NASA. The most recent one of them is NASA World Wind 1.4, which was premiered on 14 February 2007. This version was developed by the bodies as World Wind central or free earth foundation.
For using NASA, world wind the user has to download it from the official website. A free version is available for the general users. However, there are some requirements that the computer on which the user is going to install it should have. Internet connection is a very important thing that is required after the installation; the user can interactively browse through the imagery provided by NASA World Wind.
The browsing through NASA World Wind is very simple as it is specially designed for use by the common people. For this, the user just has to click and hold the image and then drag it in the direction in which he wants to view. Moreover, he can rotate the globe, tilt, zoom in or zoom out of the view. NASA World Wind does not just provide imagery but this also provides information related to the different places. it in its store five million place names, coordinates, latitude and longitudes, political boundaries of countries and states for United States.
While using NASA World Wind the user browses through the geospatial data with the help of an internet controls connection and the OGC’s WMS servers, ESRI shapefiles and kml/kmz files for import. The latest version i.e. 1.4 however uses WFS during the download of place names.
One more very useful feature of world wind is the support for X i.e. the DirectX3D polygon mesh models. Moreover, it also provides images featuring the atmospheric effects as shading and scattering of sunlight.
The resolution also is one of the major features of NASA World Wind. In the metropolitan areas in United States, the resolution is such that it can depict the individual structures as houses people and their shadows, etc, clearly. While the resolution for the regions outside United States as is 15 meters for each pixel. The digital elevation data collected by the Shuttle Radar Topography mission for NASA also is available for the users. With this feature, they can view the topographic specifications of the different places in the three dimensional mode.
In addition to this to this it also has several add-ons like image layers, point layers, trail layers, line layers, etc. these add-ons increase the usefulness even further. Moreover, it also features blogs where the user can find information or postings of other users.
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