At any particular time, the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) is involved in providing visualization products, systems, and expertise to various NASA projects and missions. This page briefly describes our current activities, with links to more information.

Earth Science Enterprise (ESE)
Informal Education

Through this project, the members of the SVS create animations and imagery explaining current NASA missions and scientific results. For each visualization product, a team of scientists, writers, and animators work together to create products that can be used by the TV and print media, educators, museums, the public, and anyone else who might need to explain some NASA result. Most of the actual visualizations found on this web site are products of this project.

Find out more about the ESE Informal Education Project

CT Earth and Space Science Project

For the last decade, NASA has been a part of the Federal Computational Technologies (CT) Program, fostering research and development in high performance information technology. The CT Earth and Space Science Project at Goddard works to facilitate the use of these technologies within the Earth and Space Science research community. The SVS supports this project by providing expertise in visualization to the researchers funded by the project and by investigating visualization technologies that can enable use of computational technologies in research. The SVS also creates a video production describing the project each year for the Supercomputing conference.

Find out more about the CT Earth and Space Science Project

GLOBE Visualization

Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) in an international program whose purpose in to involve the school children of the work in environmental monitoring and education. The SVS created the original on-line visualization system used by GLOBE students to investigate their data. A separate group was spun off to update and maintain this system and this group maintains close ties to the SVS.

Visit the online GLOBE Visualization System

Find out more about GLOBE

Earth Today

Earth Today is an award-winning exhibition located in the Rocketry and Space Flight gallery of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. This exhibit continuously collects and displays animations of current data about the Earth. Members of the SVS created the animations and the software system used in the display. Work is in progress to generalize this system for use in other museums and public sites and to create a Digital Earth Data Server to serve the data to the distributed systems.

Find out more about Earth Today

Digital Earth

The Digital Earth Initiative seeks to enable the creation of a global environment for the interchange and dissemination of geo-referenced information about the Earth. Members of the SVS created and maintain the Digital Earth Workbench, which was one of the early technologies that fostered the Digital Earth concept. Both the GLOBE Visualization system and the Earth Today system are Digital Earth systems in that they comply with emerging Digital Earth standards and protocols.

Find out more about the Digital Earth

Missions

The SVS directly supports individual NASA missions by creating specific visualization products and systems. At this time, the SVS is working with the following projects: