NASA World Wind overview 5
The typical high-resolution imagery of NASA World Wind
For New Zealand
For new Zealand it provides the imagery as zoomit!. It is able to provide the images of the resolution of 2.5 meter per pixel. More these images are colorful and grayscale.
For Western Australia
For the western austrialia it provides the zoomit! Imagery, which features the 250K surface 250K topographic data, geology mosaic, Bouger Gravity, and Magnetic Intensity.
South Africa:
For South Africa, the Zoomit! Data of the Robben Island is available, for a resolution of about 0.5 meters per pixel.
Altitude resolution: for the United states the altitude resolution is about 30 meters (about 1 arcsecond, USGS NED), for the rest of the globe it is about 90 meters (about 3 arcseconds,SRTM) and for the oceans it is about 2 arcseconds or better than that.
The updating of the imagery:
The most of the images were taken by the NASA World Wind, in the year 1990. It refreshes or updates the imagery from time to time. However, this update is different for the different images. For example for the USGS images are as old as 1990.
While the Landsat 7 images are recent ones and taken in the year 1999(exception Geocover taken in 1990).
Downloading and installing NASA World Wind
NASA World Wind is a free product. It can be downloaded from the official website and that too in the form of the full install. However, you must go through the terms and conditions for use of NASA World Wind before downloading it. One you download it, you can freely use it with the help of a computer and internet connection.
In addition, there are some system requirements for downloading the NASA World Wind.
They are as given under.
a) Your computer should have a windows 2000 or windows XP as the operating system.
b) Your computer should have a processor as Intel Pentium 3.1 or AMD Athlon or a processor more powerful than them.
c) It should have a random access memory of 256 MB.
d) Is should have a 3D Graphics Card. However, not all the 3D Graphics Cards are compatible and therefore it is advisable to check at the http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Video Card Compatibility
e) You should have a DSL or a Cable or faster connection.
f) Also, it is important to have a free disk space of 2 GB.
Notes:
a)The NASA World Wind will run better if, you have 3D video card with 3D acceleration. Therefore, it is advisable to have one. If you have a computer purchased within the last 2 years, you can get it installed with the video card.
b)Further, note that the NASA World Wind works only with the .NET framework. In addition to this you computer should have a DirectX installed on it. You can download both of these on your computer if it does not have them.
c)NASA World Wind features the data that can be zoomed into. Therefore, while viewing the images after sometime the NASA World Wind requires to, download more images, and this it does automatically. During this process, the servers of the NASA World Wind that perform this task are busy and therefore if you give some other command at this time, it will not respond.
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