Starship Asterisk*

[b]The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provides this view of Olympus Mons, the tallest known volcano in the solar system. [i](Credit: NASA/JPL/Microsoft/University of Arizona)[/i][/b]

---

NASA and Microsoft Research are bringing Mars to life with new features in the WorldWide Telescope software that provide viewers with a high-resolution 3-D map of the Red Planet.

Microsoft's online virtual telescope explores the universe using images NASA spacecraft return from other worlds. Teams at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., jointly developed the software necessary to make NASA's planetary data available in WorldWide Telescope.
...
The fully-interactive images and new NASA data will allow viewers to virtually explore Mars and make their own scientific discoveries. New features include the highest-resolution fully interactive map of Mars ever created, realistic 3-D renderings of the surface of the planet, and video tours with two NASA scientists
...
The Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames Research Center developed open source software that runs on the NASA Nebula cloud computing platform to create and host the high-resolution maps. The maps contain 74,000 images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera (MGS MOC) and more than 13,000 high-resolution images of Mars taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Each individual HiRISE image contains more than a billion pixels. The complete maps were rendered into image mosaics containing more than half a billion smaller images.
...
To learn more and download the WorldWide Telescope, visit http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/.