View the Moon in 3D on Your Desktop

TheBeansprout writes "You can now view the moon in 3D With NASA World Wind with two sets of Clementine data and full placenames. "We have just digested the best of the images, so we can now deliver the moon at 66 feet (20 meters) of resolution" says Patrick Hogan, World Wind project manager at NASA Ames. "This is a first. No one has ever explored our moon in the 3-D interactive environment that World Wind creates," he adds. Download World Wind and view the quick tutorial or tour to interact, and there's some moon screenshots available too. A linux version of World Wind is slated for early 2006."

Comments

Re:In the mean time...

[Bungopolis]

Celestia is a "universe" explorer, and it's very good at its job. WorldWind is a "world" explorer, and it's very good at its job.

WorldWind has two primary advantages over Celestia for exploring the Moon:

* Streamed imagery - data is downloaded as you view, which makes it possible to support extremely high resolution and detailed data that, if downloaded all at once (as would have to be the case with Celestia), would span hundreds of gigabytes.

* Topographic projection - WorldWind supports topographic data for both the Earth and the Moon. This means that if you can see craters and mountains in 3D, which is what really sets it apart from viewing a flat image. Even viewing a flat image projected onto a simple sphere (as in Celestia) is not much more enlightening than viewing a flat photograph of the sphere itself.

data data data only 22 CDROMs

[rednuhter]

the 22 CD ROMs from the Clementine project can be accessed from here

http://starbase.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/clem1-l-h-5-d im-mosaic-v1.0/
(jpegs are in the browse directories)

or if you have not the got the bandwidth they are only 220 USD from

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cd-rom/web_store.cgi?ca tegory=hires

now if only I could find a the above as a DVD torrent, hmmm

Re:20m resolution and the landing sites...

[NeoThermic]

>I guess this means we still won't be able to see the landing sites in enough detail?

Correct. The largest object that is on the moon is the 14036kg SIVB from Apollo 15. Located at 1.51S 17.48W (or as a WWURI: worldwind://goto/world=Moon&lat=-1.51&lon=-17.48&a lt=13402 ), it isn't actually visible, possibly because that is its impact place, rather than a resting place (so it could well be smashed).

The largest intact objects is the Lunar Rovers, and there's three of them ( Apollo 15's rover (worldwind://goto/world=Moon&lat=26.08&lon=3.66&al t=13402), Apollo 16's rover (worldwind://goto/world=Moon&lat=-8.97&lon=-15.51& alt=13402) and Apollo 17's rover (worldwind://goto/world=Moon&lat=20.17&lon=-30.77& alt=13402), however at about 2 meters in length, on a 20m/pixel basis they are a 10th of a pixel.

So in short, if you're looking for 'evidence', you'll be waiting for higher-res images :)

NeoThermic

P.S. Sorry for the non-clickable URL's, but slashdot strips out the usefull characters, so WWURI's end up as: worldwind:gotoworldMoonlat-151lon-1748alt13402, which is useless