WorldWide Telescope Offers 25 Terabytes of Data and Imagery

In just under a year, Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope has managed to grow to a consistent size and to attract a strong installed base, and the evolution of the project continues with a steadfast pace. Launched in public beta in May 2008, WorldWide Telescope is currently offering no less than 25 Terabytes (TB) of both data and imagery, allowing users to explore the known universe from their desktops. And in just a year, the company has also managed to attract an audience of approximately 2 million users, who have downloaded the client enabling them to turn traditional desktops into astronomical observatories. The project was also nominated for the Edison Award and an American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) award in just its first year since launch.

Microsoft underlined that the volume of astronomical data and images made available to the public through the WorldWide Telescope was equivalent to no less than the contents of 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica, while still managing to be smaller than a single update to Virtual Earth. However, new information and imagery is added “aggressively” to the online virtual telescope. This week alone, Microsoft revealed that over 100 Terabytes of new content focused on Mars and the Moon would be made available via the WorldWide Telescope from the NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field.

The new data comes courtesy of NASA and the agency's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). At the same time, updates to the service in 2009 allow users to access content directly via their browsers, provided that Silverlight is installed, with the desktop client no longer required.

WorldWide Telescope is a project developed by Curtis Wong, principal researcher, and Jonathan Fay, a principal research software design engineer, both with Microsoft Research. However, Jim Gray, a Microsoft technical fellow, is credited as having fathered the project. Microsoft spread its efforts around the world in order to gather localized telescope data, but also collaborated with universities in order to translate the user interface of the online virtual telescope.

“Basically what that allows you to do…if you have a user in Australia, you don’t want all of the requests for information from Australia to have to go all the way around the world,” Fay explained. “So someone at a university there can host a mirror with a good portion of the core data…and get high performance.”