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NASA Space Technology

Instrument and Sensing Technology

Planetary Tour Guide

All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,

Welcome to the Planetary Tour Guide. Several locations have nice tours of the solar system or a particular planet (including earth) that include images. Another excellent page, organized in a similar manner to this page (and probably more up-to-date) is Planets, the Solar System from the Galaxy Page maintained by the University of Arizona SEDS (Students for the Exploration And Development of Space).

You might also be interested in the following pages I have pulled together:

• Space Mission Acronym List and Hyperlink Guide
• Ground-based Solar and Astrophysical Observatory Guide
• Instrument and Sensing Technology Museum Guide

Please let me know of any sites that should be added to these lists (Gordon.Johnston@hq.nasa.gov).

PLANETARY TOURS

• New! NASA's Planetary Photojournal. Because of the high level of traffic, two sites are available:
  • NASA's Planetary Photojournal (JPL, California site)
  • NASA's Planetary Photojournal (USGS site)
• Solar System Live, the interactive Orrery of the Web, lets you view the solar system in a variety of ways for any date between 4713 B.C. and A.D. 8000. An ephemeris can be displayed for any location on Earth and, given orbital elements in the form published in the IAU Circulars, the orbit and position of asteroids and comets can be plotted.
• Please select a mirror site close to you for the Nine Planets - a Multimedia Tour of the Solar System by Bill Arnett, a 1995 Best of the Net Nominee! The Nine Planets describes each of the 70 planets and moons in the solar system with text, pictures, sounds, an occasional movie and links to other related net resources. It is best viewed on-line via a graphical World Wide Web browser (such as Netscape, Mosaic or MacWeb) which displays the pictures in color and supports hypertext link traversal. With the obvious limitations, it can also be read with a text-only browser or even printed.
• The Solar System This page contains links to more planetary tours than I have found. Go take a look!
• The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Welcome to the Planets offers a guided tour of the solar system's planets, asteroids and comets with images, facts and figures. Mirror sites (I have not double checked these links) are:
  • USA
    • WTP at University of Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts
    • WTP at Texas Tech University, courtesy of the Department of Physics.
    • WTP at University of Washington Courtesy of the AstroEd project at the High Performance Computing and Communications at University of Washington.
  • Canada
    • WTP at University of McGill University Montreal, Quebec. Courtesy of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
  • United Kingdom
    • WTP at University of Cambridge (not working last I checked), courtesy of Cambridge Astronomy.
  • France
    • WTP at Rennes' University of France.
  • Australia
    • WTP at Curtin University of Technology, courtesy of The John Curtin Centre.
  • Venezuela
    • WTP at Venezuela CAUTION: This is a very slow link outside of the .ve domain. Please limit your usage accordingly.
• The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) Photo Gallery. The images presented here have a number of different sources, primarily NASA missions. The NSSDC also has Planetary Fact Sheets.
• Views Of The Solar System, compiled by Calvin J. Hamilton of the DOE Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has been created as an educational tour of the solar system. It contains images and information about the Sun, planets, moons, asteroids and comets found within the solar system.
• The Solar System, compiled by Ken Edgett, Arizona State University.
• The Center for Earth and Planetary Studies (CEPS) is a NASA supported Regional Planetary Image Facility and has a page with information organized by solar system body. CEPS is one of the scientific research departments at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.
• Our Solar System from NASA Spacelink.
• The Solar System from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Britain's oldest scientific institution. These links were not working when I last tried them.
• Planetary image finders. The goal of these pages is to provide access to detailed maps and to high-resolution raw images, intended for those studying specific sites.

PLANETARY DATA SETS

• The Planetary Data System (PDS) archives and distributes digital data from past and present NASA planetary missions, astronomical observations, and laboratory measurements. The PDS is sponsored by NASA's Office of Space Science to ensure the long-term usability of data, to stimulate research, to facilitate data access, and to support correlative analysis.
• Planetary Sciences at the NSSDC. The National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) provides access to a wide variety of astrophysics, space plasma, solar physics, lunar and planetary data from NASA space flight missions, in addition to selected other data and some models and software. NSSDC provides access to online information bases about NASA and non-NASA data at the NSSDC and elsewhere and the spacecraft and experiment that have or will provide public access data. NSSDC also provides information and support relative to data management standards and technologies.

EARTH

• New, a Browser for Earth Observations from the Space Shuttle! This page also includes links to other sources of Earth images.
• How about a recent look? From the NWS.
• For details on the Earth's ocean floor, see EXPLORING THE OCEAN BASINS WITH SATELLITE ALTIMETER DATA.
• Earth Viewer.
• The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) Map Viewer with in-lined images (or with linked images) is a World-Wide Web HTTP server that accepts requests for a World or USA map and returns an HTML document including an image of the requested map. Each map image is created on demand from a geographic database. See also About the Map Viewer.
• The Virtual Tourist - II is a clickable map based guide to general information, tourist guides, and pictures for thousands of places, allowing you to "Virtually Tour" the world. The Virtual Tourist is a clickable map based guide to WWW/NIR sites in a countries around the world.
• The NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) Image Science Division Digital Image Collection has an "EARTH OBSERVATION COLLECTION" including "Earth Views by Latitude," "Earth Views by Longitude," "Earth Views by chronology," etc.
• A list of Map-Related Internet Sites from the National Atlas Information Service (NAIS), which is responsible for the development and maintenance of an authoritative synthesis of the geography of Canada.

SUN

• The Solar Eclipse Information at the Solar Data Analysis Center page has information on recent and upcoming (i.e., March 9, 1997 and February 26, 1998) total solar eclipses.
• Latest Images of the Sun
• The National Solar Observatory/Sacramento Peak Solar Zoo from the Sacramento Peak Observatory has a nice introduction to the Sun.

MOON

• The Planetary Missions and Materials Branch Exploration Server from JSC has information on the Moon and Mars.

MARS

• The Atlas of Mars and Viking Orbiter image-finder, a WWW-browsable, zoomable and scrollable atlas of Mars, showing the locations (footprints) of thousands of high-resolution Viking Orbiter images.
• The Center for Mars Exploration (CMEX)
• The Planetary Missions and Materials Branch Exploration Server from JSC has information on the Moon and Mars.

VENUS

• The Magellan Image Browser. This is an interactive browser of those Magellan image data products that have been released on Compact Disk.
• F.O.V. The Face of Venus Home Page from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at McGill University in lovely Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

SATURN

• Saturn Events

COMETS/ASTEROIDS/KUIPER BELT/OORT CLOUD

• Comet Observation Home Page
• Comet Hale-Bopp Home Page, The Great Comet of 1997?
• Comet Hyakutake: You can find lots of sites by searching by name. Here are a few I found:
  • Links to Other Comet Hyakutake Pages
• Kuiper Belt (just a few, selected links)
  • Hubble Detects Kuiper Belt Objects (not working)

ASTRONOMY/SKY GUIDES

• Today's script of the daily radio show, from StarDate Online from the Department of Astronomy and McDonald Observatory at the University of Texas at Austin.
• The Sky This Week from the U.S. Naval Observatory (for the Washington, D.C. area).

Return to:

• Instrument and Sensing Technology Page
• Advanced Technology and Mission Studies Division Page
• Office of Space Science
• NASA Headquarters Page
• NASA Page

Created June 7, 1994. Last update: August 4, 1997. Please see my Disclaimer and Web Policy page. Maintained by Gordon Johnston.

The world wide web uniform resource locator (URL) for this page is:

http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/Sensors_page/Planets.html