Winextra – Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope teams with NASA for better Mars images

Back when the Worldwide Telescope project was still under wraps at Microsoft, Robert Scoble posted about seeing something at Microsoft that made him cry it was so great. Well needless to say he got a lot of ribbing over that and when the project did go live not a lot of people felt the same way which is unfortunate because to be honest the Worldwide Telescope is pretty damn cool.

Between then and now the team working on the Worldwide Telescope haven’t been resting on their tear stained laurels. In fact they just announced a partnership with NASA in order that they can offer even better images of Mars. Apparently some of these images are so good that you can see the tracks left by the Mars rovers.

As we find out from Ina Fried in a post today

“You can see the boulders and things like that,” Dan Fay, director of Earth, Energy, and Environment for Microsoft Research. Microsoft previously teamed with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a Mars project that let youngsters and other space enthusiasts help count and label craters on the planet’s surface.

With these changes, the telescope will gain several different new views of Mars as well as guided tours from some of NASA’s experts on Earth’s neighbor.

What is even cooler in some ways is the fact that the Worldwide Telescope is based on a terapixel image of the known universe which would require 500,000 HDTV’s to show the image in its full glory.

Here’s a few of the new images courtesy of NASA and Microsoft