Andrew Yee[_1_]
May 13th 08, 03:55 PM
Microsoft Corporation
Media Relations Contacts:
Sarah Beck
Manager of Public Relations
Adler Planetarium
(312) 542-2424
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Observatory
(617) 496-7998
Jack Fischer
Communications Officer
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
(650) 234-4500, ext. 5744
Lisa De Nike
Office of News and Information
The Johns Hopkins University
(443) 287-9960
Peter Panagopoulos
Brand Marketing Director, Children's Programming
WGBH
(617) 300-3003
Carole McFall
Account Manager, NOVA Marketing & Communications
WBGH
(617) 300-3988
May 12, 2008
WorldWide Telescope Brings Space Exploration to Earth
A service free of charge from Microsoft lets students and lifelong learners
tour the night sky using high-resolution images from the worlds best land-
and space-based telescopes.
REDMOND, Wash. -- The final frontier got a bit closer today as Microsoft
Corp. officially launched the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope, which
is now available at
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org
WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together imagery
from the best ground- and space-based observatories across the world to
allow people to easily explore the night sky through their computers.
WorldWide Telescope has been eagerly anticipated by the astronomical and
educational communities as a compelling astronomical resource for students
and lifelong learners, and as a way to make science fun for children.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that
makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Bill Gates,
chairman of Microsoft. "By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and
data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that
information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and
experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young
people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest
to better understand the universe."
The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created
with the Microsoft high-performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows
seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image
environments. WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of
high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that
relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse
through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing
number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at
major universities and planetariums.
"WorldWide Telescope brings to life a dream that many of us in Microsoft
Research have pursued for years, and we are proud to release this as a free
service to anyone who wants to explore the universe," said Curtis Wong,
manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group. "Where is Saturn in the
sky, in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive
black hole in the center of the galaxy? With the universe at your
fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself."
The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can choose
which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space
Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope
or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky -- in the
past, present or future. They can view the universe through different
wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the
galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of
the science of astronomy.
"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds,
and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud
remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," said Roy
Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "I
believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the
way we view the universe."
Microsoft Research has formed close ties with members of the academic,
education and scientific communities to make WorldWide Telescope a reality.
NASA along with other organizations coordinated with Microsoft Research to
provide the imagery, provide feedback on the application from a scientific
point of view, and help turn WorldWide Telescope into a rich learning
application.
Microsoft's mission to make the universe accessible to everyone was begun
years ago by renowned Microsoft Senior Researcher Jim Gray. WorldWide
Telescope is built on top of Gray's pioneering development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases including SkyServer and his contributions
to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to map a large part of the
Northern sky outside of the galaxy. Microsoft Research is releasing
WorldWide Telescope as a service free of charge to the astronomy and
education communities as a tribute to Gray with the hope that it will
inspire and empower kids of all ages to explore and understand the universe
in an unprecedented way.
About Microsoft Research
Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic
and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goals
are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce the cost of
writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing technologies.
Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with
leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state
of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition, user-interface
research, natural language processing, programming tools and methodologies,
operating systems and networking, and the mathematical sciences. Microsoft
Research currently employs more than 800 people in six labs located in
Redmond, Wash.; Cambridge, Mass.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge,
England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research
collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to enhance the
teaching and learning experience, inspire technological innovation, and
broadly advance the field of computer science. More information can be found
at
http://www.research.microsoft.com
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and
solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
WorldWide Telescope Partners Community
Microsoft Research would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the
following organizations that provided images, guided tours and their
expertise to make WorldWide Telescope and the universe available to
explorers of all ages.
Adler Planetarium
Doug Roberts, director of the Adler Space Visualization Laboratory (SVL),
created the tour "Center of the Milky Way Galaxy" based on his radio data
research for the WorldWide Telescope. This tour, and other future tours,
will first be available in the SVL and then in the CyberSpace Gallery.
Visitors to Adler will be able to access WorldWide Telescope at kiosks set
up in the SVL. WorldWide Telescope also will be incorporated into select
"Astronomy Conversations," daily conversations with Adler astronomers, which
take place Monday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the SVL.
WorldWide Telescope "has the possibility of being transformative in the way
we educate people and get them to become familiar with and excited about
astronomy." - Lucy Fortson, Vice President for Research, Adler Planetarium
and Astronomy Museum, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Astronomy
and Astrophysics, University of Chicago.
California Institute of Technology
WorldWide Telescope is "a beautiful platform for explaining and getting
people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers
will come to use it as well." - Roy Williams, Senior Scientist, California
Institute of Technology.
"The WorldWide Telescope is going to be a fantastic outreach platform for
astronomy and perhaps even applied computing and information science." -
George Djorgovski, Professor of Astronomy and Faculty Director, Center for
Advanced Computing Research, California Institute of Technology.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's flagship X-ray telescope and part of
its "Great Observatories" program, has contributed about 30 images to the
WorldWide Telescope. These include not only images that contain X-ray data
but also others that are multiwavelength composites of different types of
radiation. In addition, staff members at Chandra have provided video and
narration for six tours on galaxies and supernovas and their remnants.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Researchers and educators at Harvard have been excited to be working with
Microsoft on many aspects of WorldWide Telescope. In addition to consulting
on WorldWide Telescope features and data sets, Alyssa Goodman, professor of
astronomy and founding director of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative
Computing, created a tour called "Dust & Us." She and Curtis Wong are also
collaborating with WGBH to explore how to utilize WorldWide Telescope for
education in a variety of media over the coming year. Roy Gould, a noted
education researcher in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics'
Science Education Group, has been working with Wong to hone the WorldWide
Telescope's educational approach. Gould also presented the technical preview
of WorldWide Telescope at the 2008 TED conference.
"WorldWide Telescope has enough capability that even professional
astronomers and astrophysicists are eager to use it, not just as a mechanism
for public outreach, but for our own work." - Alyssa Goodman, Professor of
Astronomy, Director of the Initiative in Innovative Computing, Harvard
University.
"The beauty of the WorldWide Telescope is that it enables us to seamlessly
connect the world of learning that takes place in a science museum with the
learning that can take place at home over the Web, with this much larger
access to the whole world of astronomy." - Roy Gould, Director, NASA
Smithsonian Universe Education Forum, Science.
Education Department, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission.
.... The WorldWide Telescope gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their
imagination." - Robert Kirshner, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University.
Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has agreed to partner with
Microsoft Corp. to design an educational strategy for the WorldWide
Telescope. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants
since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and
around the world. The foundation concentrates its resources on activities in
education, the environment, global development, performing arts,
philanthropy and population, and makes grants to support disadvantaged
communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"This puts not the world but the universe at a student's fingertips, and
challenges them to explore. It's simply an amazing tool. We envision
open-ended curricula that encourage the student in everyone." - Catherine
Casserly, Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative, Hewlett
Foundation.
Johns Hopkins University
Alexander Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor of astronomy in the Henry A.
Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor of computer
science at the Johns Hopkins University, worked with renowned Microsoft
Senior Researcher Jim Gray on the development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases such as SkyServer and the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey. In addition, Szalay's group at Johns Hopkins built the
multiterabyte archive for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (known as the Cosmic
Genome Project) and played a major role in the National Virtual Observatory,
an alliance to construct a system connecting all astronomy data in the
world.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a wonderful demonstration ... the ability to see
the whole sky in context. And it gives you an appreciation of how big the
universe really is." - Alex Szalay, Professor of Physics, the Johns Hopkins
University.
"WorldWide Telescope will allow people to start by looking at the sky that
they experience and zoom in to a single scientific result. WorldWide
Telescope is a way of making that connection in a way that's never been made
before." - Jordan Raddick, Science Education and Outreach Coordinator, the
Johns Hopkins University.
NASA
NASA coordinated with Microsoft to make images from its portfolio of
astronomical and planetary content available through WorldWide Telescope,
including images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a great example of a piece of educational
software that's been designed intelligently from the ground up. And it is
the most impressive one I've seen to date to handle the visualization of the
sky in a very interactive, smooth, clean interface." - Robert Hurt,
Astronomer, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, California Institute of
Technology.
WGBH Boston
WGBH Boston, the single largest producer of PBS prime-time, children's and
online programming, and a pioneer in educational multimedia and media access
technologies, is collaborating with Microsoft to develop engaging online
content using the WorldWide Telescope technology. WGBH's NOVA is working
with Microsoft to develop an interactive online tour that will use the
WorldWide Telescope to navigate science and technology content from NOVA
broadcasts and Web site content. The WGBH kids program Fetch! is exploring
the possibility of a segment where an episode's challenge uses the WorldWide
Telescope. In addition, WGBH's Teachers' Domain is looking at ways to create
an online tour for educators and students to use the WorldWide Telescope.
"WorldWide Telescope really seems to be opening a door for everyone to
explore and connect with the heavens ... exploring stories that they don't
even know are available to them." - Jonathan C. Abbott, President and Chief
Executive Officer, WGBH Educational Foundation.
Griffith Observatory and Space Telescope Science Institute (STSCI) also are
WorldWide Telescope partners.
Media Relations Contacts:
Sarah Beck
Manager of Public Relations
Adler Planetarium
(312) 542-2424
Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Observatory
(617) 496-7998
Jack Fischer
Communications Officer
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
(650) 234-4500, ext. 5744
Lisa De Nike
Office of News and Information
The Johns Hopkins University
(443) 287-9960
Peter Panagopoulos
Brand Marketing Director, Children's Programming
WGBH
(617) 300-3003
Carole McFall
Account Manager, NOVA Marketing & Communications
WBGH
(617) 300-3988
May 12, 2008
WorldWide Telescope Brings Space Exploration to Earth
A service free of charge from Microsoft lets students and lifelong learners
tour the night sky using high-resolution images from the worlds best land-
and space-based telescopes.
REDMOND, Wash. -- The final frontier got a bit closer today as Microsoft
Corp. officially launched the public beta of its WorldWide Telescope, which
is now available at
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org
WorldWide Telescope is a rich Web application that brings together imagery
from the best ground- and space-based observatories across the world to
allow people to easily explore the night sky through their computers.
WorldWide Telescope has been eagerly anticipated by the astronomical and
educational communities as a compelling astronomical resource for students
and lifelong learners, and as a way to make science fun for children.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a powerful tool for science and education that
makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe," said Bill Gates,
chairman of Microsoft. "By combining terabytes of incredible imagery and
data with easy-to-use software for viewing and moving through all that
information, the WorldWide Telescope opens the door to new ways to see and
experience the wonders of space. Our hope is that it will inspire young
people to explore astronomy and science, and help researchers in their quest
to better understand the universe."
The application itself is a blend of software and Web 2.0 services created
with the Microsoft high-performance Visual Experience Engine, which allows
seamless panning and zooming around the heavens with rich image
environments. WorldWide Telescope stitches together terabytes of
high-resolution images of celestial bodies and displays them in a way that
relates to their actual position in the sky. People can freely browse
through the solar system, galaxy and beyond, or take advantage of a growing
number of guided tours of the sky hosted by astronomers and educators at
major universities and planetariums.
"WorldWide Telescope brings to life a dream that many of us in Microsoft
Research have pursued for years, and we are proud to release this as a free
service to anyone who wants to explore the universe," said Curtis Wong,
manager of Microsoft's Next Media Research Group. "Where is Saturn in the
sky, in relation to the moon? Does the Milky Way really have a supermassive
black hole in the center of the galaxy? With the universe at your
fingertips, you can discover the answers for yourself."
The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can choose
which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space
Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope
or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky -- in the
past, present or future. They can view the universe through different
wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the
galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of
the science of astronomy.
"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds,
and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud
remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," said Roy
Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "I
believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the
way we view the universe."
Microsoft Research has formed close ties with members of the academic,
education and scientific communities to make WorldWide Telescope a reality.
NASA along with other organizations coordinated with Microsoft Research to
provide the imagery, provide feedback on the application from a scientific
point of view, and help turn WorldWide Telescope into a rich learning
application.
Microsoft's mission to make the universe accessible to everyone was begun
years ago by renowned Microsoft Senior Researcher Jim Gray. WorldWide
Telescope is built on top of Gray's pioneering development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases including SkyServer and his contributions
to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to map a large part of the
Northern sky outside of the galaxy. Microsoft Research is releasing
WorldWide Telescope as a service free of charge to the astronomy and
education communities as a tribute to Gray with the hope that it will
inspire and empower kids of all ages to explore and understand the universe
in an unprecedented way.
About Microsoft Research
Founded in 1991, Microsoft Research is dedicated to conducting both basic
and applied research in computer science and software engineering. Its goals
are to enhance the user experience on computing devices, reduce the cost of
writing and maintaining software, and invent novel computing technologies.
Researchers focus on more than 55 areas of computing and collaborate with
leading academic, government and industry researchers to advance the state
of the art in such areas as graphics, speech recognition, user-interface
research, natural language processing, programming tools and methodologies,
operating systems and networking, and the mathematical sciences. Microsoft
Research currently employs more than 800 people in six labs located in
Redmond, Wash.; Cambridge, Mass.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge,
England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research
collaborates openly with colleges and universities worldwide to enhance the
teaching and learning experience, inspire technological innovation, and
broadly advance the field of computer science. More information can be found
at
http://www.research.microsoft.com
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services and
solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.
WorldWide Telescope Partners Community
Microsoft Research would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the
following organizations that provided images, guided tours and their
expertise to make WorldWide Telescope and the universe available to
explorers of all ages.
Adler Planetarium
Doug Roberts, director of the Adler Space Visualization Laboratory (SVL),
created the tour "Center of the Milky Way Galaxy" based on his radio data
research for the WorldWide Telescope. This tour, and other future tours,
will first be available in the SVL and then in the CyberSpace Gallery.
Visitors to Adler will be able to access WorldWide Telescope at kiosks set
up in the SVL. WorldWide Telescope also will be incorporated into select
"Astronomy Conversations," daily conversations with Adler astronomers, which
take place Monday to Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the SVL.
WorldWide Telescope "has the possibility of being transformative in the way
we educate people and get them to become familiar with and excited about
astronomy." - Lucy Fortson, Vice President for Research, Adler Planetarium
and Astronomy Museum, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Astronomy
and Astrophysics, University of Chicago.
California Institute of Technology
WorldWide Telescope is "a beautiful platform for explaining and getting
people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers
will come to use it as well." - Roy Williams, Senior Scientist, California
Institute of Technology.
"The WorldWide Telescope is going to be a fantastic outreach platform for
astronomy and perhaps even applied computing and information science." -
George Djorgovski, Professor of Astronomy and Faculty Director, Center for
Advanced Computing Research, California Institute of Technology.
Chandra X-ray Observatory
The Chandra X-ray Observatory, NASA's flagship X-ray telescope and part of
its "Great Observatories" program, has contributed about 30 images to the
WorldWide Telescope. These include not only images that contain X-ray data
but also others that are multiwavelength composites of different types of
radiation. In addition, staff members at Chandra have provided video and
narration for six tours on galaxies and supernovas and their remnants.
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Researchers and educators at Harvard have been excited to be working with
Microsoft on many aspects of WorldWide Telescope. In addition to consulting
on WorldWide Telescope features and data sets, Alyssa Goodman, professor of
astronomy and founding director of Harvard's Initiative in Innovative
Computing, created a tour called "Dust & Us." She and Curtis Wong are also
collaborating with WGBH to explore how to utilize WorldWide Telescope for
education in a variety of media over the coming year. Roy Gould, a noted
education researcher in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics'
Science Education Group, has been working with Wong to hone the WorldWide
Telescope's educational approach. Gould also presented the technical preview
of WorldWide Telescope at the 2008 TED conference.
"WorldWide Telescope has enough capability that even professional
astronomers and astrophysicists are eager to use it, not just as a mechanism
for public outreach, but for our own work." - Alyssa Goodman, Professor of
Astronomy, Director of the Initiative in Innovative Computing, Harvard
University.
"The beauty of the WorldWide Telescope is that it enables us to seamlessly
connect the world of learning that takes place in a science museum with the
learning that can take place at home over the Web, with this much larger
access to the whole world of astronomy." - Roy Gould, Director, NASA
Smithsonian Universe Education Forum, Science.
Education Department, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission.
.... The WorldWide Telescope gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their
imagination." - Robert Kirshner, Professor of Astronomy, Harvard University.
Hewlett Foundation
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has agreed to partner with
Microsoft Corp. to design an educational strategy for the WorldWide
Telescope. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has been making grants
since 1967 to help solve social and environmental problems at home and
around the world. The foundation concentrates its resources on activities in
education, the environment, global development, performing arts,
philanthropy and population, and makes grants to support disadvantaged
communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"This puts not the world but the universe at a student's fingertips, and
challenges them to explore. It's simply an amazing tool. We envision
open-ended curricula that encourage the student in everyone." - Catherine
Casserly, Director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative, Hewlett
Foundation.
Johns Hopkins University
Alexander Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor of astronomy in the Henry A.
Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy and professor of computer
science at the Johns Hopkins University, worked with renowned Microsoft
Senior Researcher Jim Gray on the development of large-scale,
high-performance online databases such as SkyServer and the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey. In addition, Szalay's group at Johns Hopkins built the
multiterabyte archive for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (known as the Cosmic
Genome Project) and played a major role in the National Virtual Observatory,
an alliance to construct a system connecting all astronomy data in the
world.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a wonderful demonstration ... the ability to see
the whole sky in context. And it gives you an appreciation of how big the
universe really is." - Alex Szalay, Professor of Physics, the Johns Hopkins
University.
"WorldWide Telescope will allow people to start by looking at the sky that
they experience and zoom in to a single scientific result. WorldWide
Telescope is a way of making that connection in a way that's never been made
before." - Jordan Raddick, Science Education and Outreach Coordinator, the
Johns Hopkins University.
NASA
NASA coordinated with Microsoft to make images from its portfolio of
astronomical and planetary content available through WorldWide Telescope,
including images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.
"The WorldWide Telescope is a great example of a piece of educational
software that's been designed intelligently from the ground up. And it is
the most impressive one I've seen to date to handle the visualization of the
sky in a very interactive, smooth, clean interface." - Robert Hurt,
Astronomer, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, California Institute of
Technology.
WGBH Boston
WGBH Boston, the single largest producer of PBS prime-time, children's and
online programming, and a pioneer in educational multimedia and media access
technologies, is collaborating with Microsoft to develop engaging online
content using the WorldWide Telescope technology. WGBH's NOVA is working
with Microsoft to develop an interactive online tour that will use the
WorldWide Telescope to navigate science and technology content from NOVA
broadcasts and Web site content. The WGBH kids program Fetch! is exploring
the possibility of a segment where an episode's challenge uses the WorldWide
Telescope. In addition, WGBH's Teachers' Domain is looking at ways to create
an online tour for educators and students to use the WorldWide Telescope.
"WorldWide Telescope really seems to be opening a door for everyone to
explore and connect with the heavens ... exploring stories that they don't
even know are available to them." - Jonathan C. Abbott, President and Chief
Executive Officer, WGBH Educational Foundation.
Griffith Observatory and Space Telescope Science Institute (STSCI) also are
WorldWide Telescope partners.