Imagine flying around in space to examine a future space observatory that’s under construction today. Thanks to animators and web developers, Internet users can get a fly by tour of NASA's next-generation, tennis court-sized James Webb Space Telescope on their computer.
This new interactive utilizes cutting-edge Flash and 3-D interactivity through an engine for Flash called Away 3D. Models of this complexity are rarely truly interactive, and this one comes at the start of a trend that will bring true 3D interactivity to the web via Flash."We wanted to make the 3-D Webb feature fun and inviting," said Michael McClare, Senior Media Producer for the Webb telescope project for Honeywell at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He said that users do not need to download anything to make the interactive fly-by tour work.
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An innovative new radio telescope array under construction in central New Mexico will eventually harness the power of more than 13,000 antennas and provide a fresh eye to the sky. The antennas, which resemble droopy ceiling fans, form the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky from horizon to horizon over a wide range of frequencies.
The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems, which represent a major component of the observatory.
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Astronomers have uncovered a burgeoning galactic metropolis, the most distant known in the early universe. This ancient collection of galaxies presumably grew into a modern galaxy cluster similar to the massive ones seen today.
The developing cluster, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, was discovered and characterized by multi-wavelength telescopes, including NASA's Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble space telescopes and the ground-based W.M. Keck Observatory and Japan's Subaru Telescope.
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