Space Station, Next Mars Rover Shine in 3-D

The next best thing to flying to the International Space Station is NASA?s virtual ringside seat.

NASA teamed up once again with Microsoft to offer online users two new three-dimensional, interactive tours ? one of the orbiting outpost and another of the next Mars rover. Space enthusiasts can see and interact with photos of the station and the rover and navigate around them in three virtual dimensions with the click of a mouse.

The magic is made with hundreds of digital photographs that astronauts snapped, all stitched together using Microsoft?s Photosynth technology.

?Although you're not flying 220 miles above the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, it allows you to navigate and view amazing details of the real station as though you were there," Bill Gerstenmaier said in a statement. Gerstenmaier is an associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Viewers can click and drag their way around NASA?s hardware and zoom in to see the details like the space station's modules and solar arrays or zoom out for a big-picture view of the complex.

NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus took the internal images of the space station during the 129 days she lived onboard. She photographed the station?s exterior while aboard the space shuttle Discovery, which flew her back to Earth in March. The rover images were taken of a full-scale model in a Mars-simulation testing area at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Photosynth has multiple potential benefits for NASA. Engineers can use it to examine hardware, and astronauts can use it for space station familiarization training, NASA said in a statement. 

NASA's Photosynth collection can be viewed at http://www.nasa.gov/photosynth. The NASA images also can be viewed on Microsoft?s Virtual Earth Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth. 

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