Mar 24 2009
From The Space Library
NASA and Microsoft Corporation announced plans to make planetary images and data available to the public via the Internet under a Space Act Agreement. The project required NASA and Microsoft jointly to develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to enable the public to explore NASA content using the WorldWide Telescope, Microsoft’s online virtual telescope for exploring the universe. Online since 2008, WorldWide Telescope combined images from ground- and space-based telescopes to simulate the experience of peering into the cosmos. The agreement directed NASA’s ARC in Moffett Field, California, to process and host more than 100 terabytes of data, which WorldWide Telescope would incorporate later in 2009. The data would feature imagery from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which NASA had launched in 2005 to examine Mars using several instruments, including a high-resolution camera. Since 2006, MRO had returned more data than all other Mars missions combined. NASA planned to launch its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) in May 2009. After LRO images became publicly available later in 2009, NASA intended to include those images in the WorldWide Telescope project. The agreement built on a prior collaboration with Microsoft, in which NASA had developed three-dimensional, interactive Microsoft Photosynth collections of the Space Shuttle launchpad and other KSC facilities.
NASA, “NASA and Microsoft To Make Universe of Data Available to the Public,” news release 09-067, 24 March 2009, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2009/mar/HQ_09-067_Microsoft_WorldWide_Telescope.html (accessed 4 May 2011); Agence France-Presse, “Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope To Focus on Mars,” 25 March 2009.
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