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"Microsoft Research and NASA have teamed up once again and brought the \"most complete, highest-resolution coverage of Mars available\" to WorldWide Telescope. Microsoft's app lets you explore space either through a zoom-and-pan interface or guided tours.\nThis imagery is the handiwork of a group informally called the Mapmakers, led by NASA's Michael Broxton. Their job is to take satellite images from Mars and elsewhere in our solar system, and turn them into maps. \nYes, it sounds like every geek's dream job, and having a name that sounds like something from a William Gibson novel doesn't hurt, either. Director of Microsoft Research\u2019s Earth Dan Fay has worked with Broxton to turn these images and maps into an immersive new experience for the Worldwide Telescope.\n\u201CNASA had the images and they were open to new ways to share them. Through the WorldWide Telescope we were able to build a user interface at WWT|Mars that would allow people to take advantage of the great content they had,\u201D Fay says.\nAs far as what kind of imagery you can expect here, one example is a new dataset from the University of Arizona\u2019s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), which is a remote-sensing camera on NASA\u2019s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are taken in an incredibly high resolution \u2014 each image is a gigapixel in size \u2014 and the team took all 13,000 HiRISE images and stitched them onto one map. This map, says NASA, is the \"highest-resolution map of Mars\u2019s surface ever constructed.\"\nWorldWide Telescope is available as a desktop application or a web client (which requires Microsoft Silverlight) over at www.worldwidetelescope.org.\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/07/13/nasa-microsoft-mars/>