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

Thank you NASA for the Linux version

[MarkKnopfler]

It is indeed heartening to note that there is a plan to push out a Linux version, unlike Google which altogether seems to have forgotten the linux user.
What is even sadder about Google is that it being a Linux shop, having derived so much benefit from the existence of Linux, refuses to actually return anything to the user community.

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

[Sockatume]

I'd say it's mainly because the instruments used to take the images have a 20m resolution. When there's a camera which can take pictures of the landing sites from earth, there will be pictures of the landing sites from earth. Not before.

Imperial strikes back

[Crouty]

"so we can now deliver the moon at 66 feet (20 meters) of resolution."

I hope this is just press conference talk. Otherwise they should better not put metric in parenthesis but imperial measures. Just mod me flamebait not yet, there have rockets lost before because of this.

Developers are forking code to use java and c#!

[christophercook]

According to the developer they are planning to create a Java version for linux as well as the C#/DirectX version they have now:
http://mail.worldwindcentral.com/pipermail/worldwi nd-dev/2005-September/000736.html

This is nuts! Trying to make one big complicated from work is hard enough, making two versions of it written in different languages is inexplicable! The only real reason hinted at is that Microsoft wouldn't like NASA using Mono for an official application. Does Microsoft really want NASA to use Java just to spite Mono?

Download the code for WorldWind and have a look, then consider porting it to Java/OpenGL/Java3D. Then consider just using Mono with OpenGL bindings. Or consider funding Wine so it supports .Net based apps (maybe not that far off? Wine DirectX already works for many modern games).

Somebody talk some sense into them. Or tell me why I'm wrong, either way someone has to sort this out otherwise it's going to be a massive waste of time and money.

I'm ranting, I know - can anyone else see how backward this is?

Re:20 METERS?

[fourtyfive]

Hey, I'm a WW Dev, I do mostly imaging stuff.
Hate to break it to you, but the reason their is no imagery for your area is because of _Your Government!_ The US Government has released most of the imagery (non-classified) that it has for the whole country, and thus, we have it in World Wind. I believe New Zealand has also done such a thing. We also have some imagery from South Africa. Sine we're not google, we cant pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase the imagery from Digital Globe and the other imaging companies, so we have to wait until it becomes public domain. If you'd like data for your country in World Wind, contact YOUR government, and get the deal going! Explain to them why it would be better for them to give us the data, instead of selling it to the citizens that paid for it.