NASA Open Source

NASA has several Open Source projects available at: http://opensource.arc.nasa.gov/.

I haven't looked at all of them, but one of the ones I find more interesting is called World Wind. It's an Earth and Moon mapping program along the lines of Google Earth but it's a lot more scientifically oriented. There's lots of features and data sets there to choose from (Blue Marble, Landsat 7, SRTM +L7, MODIS, etc) and you can even write scripts for it and generate animations.

I haven't had time yet to poke through all the features, but if you're a map junkie like me, you'll definately want to check this one out!

It has a very nice 3D engine that lets you zoom in, tilt and even do flybys.

It has the Blue Marble data set that Nasa put together. It's a spectacular true-color image of the entire earth that you can adjust for the time of year and even create seasonal animations from.

The Landsat 7 data set is a collection of 15m per pixel images from 1999 - 2003. There are different sets of data from these images that include things like infrared imagery.

SRTM is Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data. This, combined with the Landsay 7 images is used to create a realistic 3D virtual world that can be explored from any angle or altitude.

And this just scratches the surface. There are lots more things to explore. In fact, I think I'll go do that now.