In March 2009, Microsoft announced an agreement with NASA, under which images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) would be incorporated into World Wide Telescope. One aspect of the NASA Space Act Agreement with Microsoft, involves the development of conversion tools that will adapt the existing imagery so that it can be offered via the WWT. This means that existing content has to be transformed into Tessellated Octahedral Adaptive Subdivision Transform (TOAST), namely the WWT format. The tools that will be built for the task at hand will subsequently be offered as open-source projects to the community.

“The intent all along was also to make the conversion utilities that were developed for this initial project available under an open source licensed distribution. This is part of Microsoft's Open Edge strategy, which allows for the extension of the platforms that we provide to the community, by the community, in cooperation with the leading domain authorities - in this case NASA,” explained Open Source Community Manager Peter Galli.

With TOAST, Microsoft is adapting flat images taken from telescopes to spherical surfaces. The process involves tailoring what is essentially a 2D picture to a 3D space. When it comes down to planets and moons, including the Earth, images taken close to the poles are problematic, because of distortion issues. However, TOAST is capable of accurately rendering the celestial poles Galli stated, revealing that the traditional Mercator projection leveraged by Google Earth and Sky in Google Earth is inferior in this respect. By contrast, TOAST is not limited to only render images of regions within 15 degrees of the poles.

“Microsoft signed that agreement so as to provide an umbrella framework of contractual terms that allows for a variety of cooperative projects. At the same time, we also entered into a project agreement that had an initial project to write code that would allow for the conversion of a lot of data about the planets (the planetary data system) and Martian survey information (LROC) into the World Wide Telescope (WWT) format,”