Megacorps are practically lining up for the privilege of disseminating fantastic volumes of astronomical images to you, John and Jane Q. Public.
Recently Google added a “Live from Mars” function to its 3-D visualization of Mars within Google Earth. The feature allows you to see images from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
Now Microsoft says it will let you explore images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, pictured at right) within its web-based astronomy application, WorldWide Telescope (WWT).
More than 100 terabytes (1 terabyte equals 1 trillion bytes) of NASA data, including images from MRO that has been studying the planet since 2006, will be incorporated into WWT later this year, according to Microsoft. Images from a camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter set to launch in May will also be made available.
The inherent coolness of “Live from Mars” is that you can see new images from Odyssey’s THEMIS camera nearly as soon as scientists themselves — within a day or so, usually.
The unprocessed THEMIS images themselves are not exactly works of art. They are detailed, but in grayscale. The instrument that takes them works in infrared.
I am not aware of any plan to post MRO images “live” on WWT. But it would indeed be very cool if they did. MRO’s HiRISE camera takes stunning images.
It would be a win for us astro fans if a little healthy rivalry between Google and Microsoft spurred them to make even more NASA data available for us to explore in a user-friendly way, either in Google Earth or WWT.
Mars in Google Earth works in Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems. The full-feature downloaded version of WWT works only on Windows machines right now. But WWT has recently made available a web-based version with all the major functions, and it runs beautifully on a Mac. No matter what operating system you run, you will be able to use the web version of WWT to look at the new MRO images, once they are available. (Note: To use the web-based WWT, you have to install a small plug-in called Microsoft Silverlight.)
If you are a true Marsaholic like me, you may also appreciate the Mars Express “web cam” that shows images of the Red Planet. It recently came back online after the craft emerged from behind the Sun. Check out the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera blog.