World Wind being Adapted for Lunar and Planetary Exploration

By incorporating lunar data into World Wind, RIACS is turning this advanced world viewing technology into a tool for scientific exploration and discovery.

World Wind, a 3D planetary world viewing technology developed at NASA's Ames Research Center and released to the open source community, is being adapted by RIACS to support NASA's Vision for Space Exploration.

While rendering data access extremely simple and having the capability of visually overlaying multiple types of information on top of each other - World Wind is being extended to provide NASA mission controllers with a 3D navigable view of the Moon.

"Making planetary data access and retrieval extremely simple is the key to truly interdisciplinary research participation." said Dr. Frank Kuehnel, RIACS Senior Research Scientist and Principle Investigator for Lunar World Wind.

Moon data now shows up as a separate loadable option from within World Wind.

Users of Lunar World Wind will be able to navigate a whole world view of the moon, ‘flying in’ to specific areas of geographic interest. As users get closer to the surface, more and more detail will be become visible. While only topographical data and data from NASA’s Clementine mission are currently integrated, data from other NASA lunar missions, including the successful Lunar Prospector mission will also be added. This includes gravimeter data, neutron probe data, magnetometer data, alpha spectrometer data, and a wide array of additional lunar information.

With it’s ability to remotely access data sets over the internet, Lunar World Wind will bring all of this data together seamlessly, without having to build expensive new infrastructure. Through this distributed architecture, terabytes of information will be placed at the fingertips of scientists around the globe, allowing them to work collaboratively on extraterrestrial mission data. By layering data from remote sources in a single, easy to navigate, 3D world view, Lunar World Wind will cost effectively bring together over 40 years of data on the moon; data which NASA has spent billions of dollars to collect.

Future Directions

Moon data now available through World Wind allows users a 3D interactive view of the lunar surface.

Since the foundation technologies being created for Lunar World Wind have broad application, they will be able to be utilized to develop other 3D navigable worlds. First up beyond the Moon will be Mars, with additional planets to follow.

By visualizing these massive planetary data sets, making them broadly accessible and easy to work with, many more people from diverse scientific backgrounds will be able to contribute to planetary exploration.

For more information on RIACS' Lunar World Wind project, please contact Dr. Frank Kuehnel at kuehnel@email.arc.nasa.gov