NASA World Wind: Opensource GIS for Mission Operations

This paper describes NASA World Wind, its technical architecture and performance, and its emerging use for mission operations. World Wind is a geographic information system that provides graphical access to terabytes of imagery and elevation models for planets and other celestial objects including satellite and other data of the Earth, Moon, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter; as well as astronomical data made available through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. World Wind is also a customizable system that can be integrated as part of other applications. World Wind is not only an application in which add-ons can be integrated, but is also being developed as a plugin that can be integrated with other applications. This paper also describes the significant contributions of the international opensource community in making World Wind what it is today. Contributions have involved the following: 1) lead development of add-ons, several of which have been integrated as part of the core system available for direct download via sourceforge, 2) lead provider of high-resolution data sets, 3) lead help desk support through Internet relay chat for end-users and developers, and 4) significant technical contributions to the core system including bug identification, tracking and resolution as well as ideas for new features and source code modifications.