The Planetary Content Team at NASA's Ames Research Center develops software that makes it easier for scientists and engineers to publish and access Earth and planetary imagery and data via the Internet. This includes both educational/outreach content aimed at the general public as well as technical data aimed at the scientific community. Headquartered in the Intelligent Systems Division at Ames, the team also includes partners in other areas of the agency and elsewhere.

The software toolkit, currently under development, builds on open-source software such as the NASA Vision Workbench, open standards such as the Open Gospatial Consortium's Web Map Service (WMS), and freely-available visualization tools such as Google Earth. To demonstrate the refine its toolkit, the Planetary Content Team also develops sample planetary content in collaboration with scientists and researchers.

We are developing and have begun to release extensions to the Google Maps API (and soon also the OpenLayers API) to make these web mapping frameworks more powerful and easy to use for Earth and planetary scientists.

The first extensions that we have released provide support for north- and south-polar stereographic projections, allowing web maps of the Lunar and Martian poles, and also provide a new and improved general-purpose global Mars base map.

You can learn more about this project from our NASA Maps Extensions info page.

The KML file format has emerged as the de facto standard for sharing geospatial data for display and visualization. We have begun releasing key Lunar and Planetary datasets in KML form, so you can easily browse them using Google Earth or another KML-compliant geobrowser. We also provide links to other Lunar and planetary KML created elsewhere.

You can learn more about this project from our Lunar and Planetary KML info page.

The Planetary Content Team develops mapping and educational tools for worlds beyond planet Earth. The first of these to be publicly released is a set of updates to Google Moon, including:

• Updated visible imagery and an elevation map, in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey.
• Stories and imagery of the Apollo missions, includig dozens of high-resolution panoramic images, thanks in large part to the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal.
• A collection of Apollo-era topographic and geoloic charts of the moon, courtesy of the Lunar and Planetary Institute.

The Planetary Content Team also manages the NASA Gallery layer in Google Earth (formerly known as NASA Featured Content). The first release includes:

• Astronaut Photography of Earth, a collection of photographs taken by astronauts on board the shuttle or International Space Station, courtesy of the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory.
• Satellite Imagery of Earth, a showcasing a range of Earth phenomena as observed by satellites in NASA's Earth observing fleet, courtesy of the NASA Earth Observatory.
• Earth's City Lights, showing light pollution across the globe, combining data from the Defense Meterological Satellite Program's OLC imager with NASA's Blue Marble: Next Generation.