What is World Wind
World Wind is an open source 3D interactive world viewer. It was formed by NASA's learning Technologies project and was released in the middle of 2004. now it has been developed by NASA staff and open source community developers. You may think of World Wind as a desk world, however, it is much more than a simple desk globe. The world wind permits any user to zoom from outer space into any place on the earth. World wind utilizes satellite imagery and elevation data to permit users to enjoy earth terrain in visually rich 3D. After viewing this, users feel as if they are really there.
World wind help you virtually visit any area in the world. With the help of world wind, you can look into the huge Canyon, across the Andes, along the African Sahara or over the Alps. World wind can shoe you thousands of place names all over the world unlike your desk globe. Here you can view everything ranging from country capitals to villages of unpolluted regions. World wind also makes you familiar with country borders and intra country borders of various US states. World wind can also be used to find out additional data and imagery. A number of add-ons will be found on world wind. In add-ons section you will find information on Norway's Prehistoric Hill forts and additional planets.
World wind provides you with following built-in features: worlds, imagery, terrain data, and tools. In worlds section, you will find Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus and Jupiter. Earth is the planet on which human being exists. Moon is considered the brightest object in the sky at nights. Venus and Mars are the inner and outer neighbors in the solar system. They are also known as the morning/evening star and the red planet. While Jupiter is the king of solar system planets.
Blue Marble Next Generation
Blue Marble is one of the major features of the World Wind. World Wind has a complete copy of the Blue Marble, which is a spectacular real-color picture of the whole earth. The Blue Marble can be viewed in all its splendor from various satellites such as Aqua and Terra. The Blue Marble Next Generation streams from the NASA servers at 0.5 km per pixel and in various 12 versions, one for every month of year.
Landsat 7 is another important feature of world wind. It is a collection of pictures from 1999-2003 at an amazing 15m per pixel resolution. Landsat 7's resolution enables you to view your own town, neighborhood and landmarks in your surrounding.
USGS
USGS means United States Geological Survey data. This is one of the significant features of World wind. It provides topography maps of the entire United States down to 1:24k scale, 1-meter detail pictures of most of the US and Urban Area images of the major cities of the US.
Rapid Fire MODIS are used to get real time images from orbiting satellites with resolution down to 250m. You can also filter the MODIS data by date and event. After that data is downloaded and it shows an icon in World Wind displaying what the event is and where it took place.
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