WorldWind: NASA-USRA Public Private Partnership for Geospatial Information System (GIS)

January 2020

NASA and USRA have formed a public-private partnership to lead WorldWind into its next phase of growth and success. An open source Geospatial Information System (GIS) with cross-platform SDKs, and web services, WorldWind enables 3D visualizations of NASA’s multi-layered, complex data sets including Earth, the Moon, Mars and beyond. WorldWind reduces the reliance on proprietary GIS tools such as Google Earth and enables sophisticated visualization of surface, subsurface, aeronautic, geospatial, planetary, and intergalactic data spanning the electromagnetic spectrum.

Background

For decades, NASA and its partners have worked to find more effective ways to visualize data from a multitude of sources in order to better serve the needs of public, private and academic GIS users. WorldWind is the result of more than 10 years of NASA investments in solving this challenge. Averaging over 200 million data service calls per month from a growing base of thousands of academic, commercial, and government users, WorldWind is enabling others to harvest the fruits of that investment.