If anyone ever tries to tell you that NASA isn’t worth the tax dollars we spend on it, you just look that person straight in the eye and say, “Oh YEAH?? Well, did you know that NASA has a program you can use to view accumulated imagery and data on our planet?”
This thing isn’t the marvel of programming that Google Earth is — it’s slow and occasionally tripped up by graphical errors, at least on my system — but I’m pretty sure there’s at least as much, if different, information available. Standard satellite pics are augmented by LandSat data, up-to-date imagery of natural phenomena, wider availability of high-res data (I can see my house!)… Data on agriculture and climate indicators, Galileo imagery, weather maps, animated satellite views of the aurora borealis and other stuff of interest.
That this alone is easily worth $16.3B annually in our federal budget of seventy hundred hojillion kabillion dollars should be more self-evident than salsa on tortilla chips. It even comes with a built-in wigital diga-whatchamaha.
NB: The current version is .Net and DirectX dependent, so it’s twitchy on WinXP and Vista, and doesn’t run at all on other operating systems, but the next version, est. beta April 07, is scheduled to be Java/OpenGL.
