I am sure most of you would have watched Star Wars before. Imagine finding yourself landed on a foreign land, or looking through the most powerful tracking system over your screen, overlook an area over a piece of land. This is what NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) World Wind has in for you. With NASA World Wind, installed users can view the moon in 3D image, with Clementine data and full place names.

According to Patrick Hogan, World Wind project manager at NASA Ames, this was the first of its kind, exploring the moon in 3D interactive environment, created by World Wind.

In addition, World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there. Basically, it allows users to virtually visit any place in the world, i.e. looking across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.

Currently, the software is only available for Windows. According to the website, Linux support is expected to be available in 2006.

System Requirement:

• Windows 2000, or XP
• Intel Pentium 3, 1 GHz, or AMD Athlon or higher
• 256 MB of RAM
• 3D Graphics Card
nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra
ATI Radeon 7500
Intel Extreme Graphics 2
• DSL / Cable connection or faster
• 2 GB of disk space

Software requirement:

• .NET runtime environment
• DirectX runtime

NASA World Wind will benefit from most video card with 3D acceleration. You may check if your video card is compatible with World Wind by clicking this link here.

Note that, after zooming into a certain point, World Wind will download more images automatically to improve the resolution in that area, hence the servers can become very busy and unresponsive at until the required infrastructure is obtained.

For “spacemen” and “aeronautic freaks”, I’m pretty sure this is a cool piece of “tracking system” you like to download and check out.