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The Space Shuttle in Google Earth

The space shuttle Atlantis is currently in flight on the program’s final voyage after launching from Cape Canaveral a few days ago, and NASA is providing some excellent tools to help track the shuttle in space.

Fist, they’ve provided a replay of the STS-135 ascent, including quite a lot of data about the shuttle as it lifted off.

Even better, they’ve also provided a live tracking file that updates every few seconds so you can follow the exact location of the shuttle.

While this is the end of the shuttle program, NASA has a variety of missions planned for the next six months, including unmanned journeys to Jupiter and Mars. Hopefully they’ll provide this kind of data for those flights as well.

On a side note, I was made aware of this by Rob Mayeda on Google+. While Google Earth Blog isn’t yet allowed to create a profile over there (only humans for now), I share Google Earth-related material fairly often and I’d love to connect with you on there. If you need an invitation to access Google+, you can request one from this site.

LiDAR views of the Carolina Bays

We’ve talked about the Carolina Bays before, but today we’ve got a great new way to view them. Michael at Cintos Research sent over some information about their new use of LiDAR DEM hsv-shaded imagery to expose as many of the Bays as they could — over 22,000 so far!

If you want to just see one quickly, here’s a KMZ file to download. To see the rest of them, you can pull individual KMZ files from this Google Fusion Table that they’ve put together.

To take it even further, their data includes placemarks for each of the 22,000 bays, with transparent png overlays to show the exact location of each Bay. Turning the overlays on and off help to reveal the bay in the standard Google Earth imagery.