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Tracking hurricanes
This 2005 Atlantic hurricane season has a been a record-breaker. Satellite imagery since June 1 has been compiled into this movie to track the 21 named storms as they formed and traveled, many making landfall.

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Hurricane Wilma
International Space Station cameras captured this incredible video of Hurricane Wilma and its well-defined eye from an altitude of 220 miles. Wilma was packing winds of 175 miles an hour as a Category 5 storm when the station flew overhead.

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Hubble examines moon
NASA has used the Hubble Space Telescope for scientific observations of the Earth's moon in the search for important oxygen-bearing minerals -- potential resources for human exploration. Scientists held this news conference on October 19 to discuss their investigations.

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Fuel tank leaves KSC
Space shuttle external fuel tank No. 120 is moved out of Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building and loaded onto a barge for transport to the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. Once there, the tank will undergo modifications prior to being returned to Florida for a future launch.

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Practicing for Stardust
Stardust spacecraft recovery and science team members meet at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston to rehearsed the steps that will be involved when recovering the comet-encountering spacecraft after its landing on Jan. 15, 2006. The spacecraft has collected cometary and interstellar particles for return to Earth.

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Space shuttle update
Space shuttle program officials Friday held a news conference at the Johnson Space Center to provide a status report on efforts to understand and fix the external tank foam insulation problems and confirm that the next launch won't happen before May 2006.

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Saturn's spongy moon
Stunning images of Saturn's moon Hyperion taken by the Cassini spacecraft show a surface dotted with craters and modified by some process, not yet understood, to create a strange, "spongy" appearance, unlike the surface of any other moon around the ringed planet.

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ISS crew back on Earth
Russian recovery forces pull the space travelers from the just-landed Soyuz capsule as dawn begins to break over the touchdown site in north-central Kazakhstan.

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NASA software zooms to nearly anywhere on moon
NASA NEWS RELEASE
Posted: October 28, 2005

Internet users can now take virtual 3-D trips to nearly anyplace on the moon, thanks to a NASA program first designed to show aerial views of the Earth.


Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
 
The newly expanded NASA 'World Wind' computer program can 'transport' Web users to almost anyplace on the moon, when they zoom in from a global view to closer pictures of our natural satellite taken by the Clementine spacecraft in the 1990s. Computer programmers at NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley originally designed the World Wind program to deliver satellite images and data of Earth to the Internet. Users can see detailed 3-D pictures of the Earth's land surface, including its elevation and climate.

"We have just digested the best of the Clementine images, so we can now deliver the moon at 66 feet (20 meters) of resolution," said Patrick Hogan, manager of the World Wind Project Office at NASA Ames. "This is a first. No one has ever explored our moon in the 3-D interactive environment that World Wind creates," noted Hogan.

Launched in early 1994, Clementine took 1.8 million pictures of the lunar surface during a two-month orbit of the moon. The Ballistic Missile Defense Organization and NASA jointly sponsored the Deep Space Program Science Experiment that included the Clementine spacecraft. Its principal objective was to 'space-qualify' lightweight imaging sensors and component technologies for the next generation of Department of Defense spacecraft.

"Imagine riding a magic carpet through the world and being able to zoom down to any point, or appear magically at any location. That's what World Wind is like," said Mark Leon, chief of the Education Division at NASA Ames. "Not only has Hogan's team produced new technology with World Wind, but they have done so as open source computer code, so it is free for all who would download it," Leon added.

"NASA World Wind allows users to explore their (computer) environment at will," Hogan said. "This leads to much greater engagement with, and by, the users and personalizes it for their own discovery." In contrast, movies are not as engaging, or immersive, in that the user does not control them, Hogan observed.

The personal computer (PC) -compatible World Wind program is available free of charge via Internet 'download.' Computer users from more than 100 nations have acquired the free World Wind program, though most users are from the United States. To download World Wind, visit: http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/

NASA World Wind is delivering terabytes of global NASA satellite data that are a result of years of daily observations of precipitation, temperature, barometric pressure and much more. Recently, hurricane Katrina data have been added to World Wind's collection of images. There are an estimated 10,000 daily users of World Wind.

In addition to improving World Wind by adding images of the moon, NASA programmers recently have increased the resolution of images of Earth from 3,281-foot (one-kilometer) resolution to 1,640-foot (500-meter) resolution in an upgrade called 'Blue Marble, Next Generation Earth.' Also, some World Wind data sets include images of the entire Earth at 49-foot (15-meter) resolution. The United States data in World Wind is at 3.3-foot (one-meter) resolution with some urban areas at one-foot (0.33-meter) resolution.

World Wind has been enabling hundreds of thousands of Internet users to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth to see across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps or along the African Sahara. World Wind accesses public domain United States Geological Survey aerial photography and topographic maps as well as Shuttle Radar Topography Mission and Landsat satellite data.