One hundred terabytes of high-resolution images of our planetary neighbors will become easier to access, thanks to a new partnership between NASA and Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope.
The new agreement, announced today, will push images from NASA's Planetary Data System into Microsoft's easier-to-navigate product. NASA's system is great for researchers looking for complete datasets, but the FTP front-end could scare off non-nerds.
"Making NASA's scientific and astronomical data more accessible to the public is a high priority for NASA, especially given the new administration's recent emphasis on open government and transparency," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's bet365体育赛事 Mission Directorate in Washington, in a press release.
NASA has launched a variety of internet-savvy initiatives in recent months, from the smart twittering of @MarsPhoenix to a new partnership with Google Mars to a climate change tracking site designed by Cisco. They don't always work out perfectly, like when a recent poll to name a space-station component got Colbert-rolled, but they show that the agency takes its mandate seriously to disseminate information in forms both astronomers and the public can use.
Rather than building proprietary websites that try to mean all things to all people, NASA is feeding its public-domain data out into the internet ecosystem and letting other people make cool stuff out of it. NASA Ames is even building a set of tools that can convert planetary data into a variety of formats that enable different types of use.
NASA Ames head, Pete Worden, acknowledged that, twittering, "Cool roll-out of NASA Cooperation with Microsoft. Now we have a trifecta —
Google, Cisco, Microsoft."
WorldWide Telescope, which is available only for Microsoft operating systems, will incorporate the NASA data by the end of 2009.
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*Image: An image of Saturn's rings from the Cassini-Huygens mission. NASA/JPL/Space bet365体育赛事 Institute
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WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired bet365体育赛事 on Facebook.
