NASA World Wind - Download 3D Virtual Globe on Desktop Free & See How the World Appears from Satellites

free-space-software-1 The NASA World Wind desktop software is similar to Microsoft Telescope & Google Earth. Satellite pictures of the world are processed in this software so that the viewer can zoom into any one place on earth.

Landsat satellite pictures of the world is combined with Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data to create zoom-able images of each point on the earth.

World Wind is open source Windows software that lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3-Dimensional images of the earth.

Landsat data is available globally but the Landsat images has a lot less resolution than the USGS Ortho imagery. For the United States, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has high resolution data available only for the United States.

USGS Urban Areas are photographed from the satellites & distributed at about .25m/pixel and only covers certain areas in the United States & provides detailed colored images.

USGS also provides another lower resolution 1m / topography which covers most of the United States, but is in black and white color. You can see most buildings and roads & even cars in this image. This is the one you can use to see the images of your house (for example) as it is seen from the satellites.

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You can download the free World Wind Software for your desktop from the NASA website. These are the images actually distributed by NASA. Software like Google Earth processes these images further, adds color & refines the images to provide more attractive maps & 3D images.

The World Wind application is a free open source software & runs only on Windows based computers. It requires Java & Windows .NET framework. For a more detailed information on the system required to run NASA World Wind, refer to the Wiki documentation.