Illuminating the Invisible: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Tour of the Moon 4K Redux

In the fall of 2011, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission released its original Tour of the Moon, a five-minute animation that takes the viewer on a virtual tour of our nearest neighbor in space. Six years later, the tour has been recreated in eye-popping 4K resolution, using the same camera path and drawing from the vastly expanded trove of data collected by LRO in the intervening years.

This virtual tour reveals the stark beauty of the Moon. It visits a number of interesting sites chosen to illustrate a variety of lunar terrain features. Some are on the near side and are familiar to both professional and amateur observers on Earth, while others can only be seen clearly from space. Some are large and old (Orientale, South Pole-Aitken), others are smaller and younger (Tycho, Aristarchus). The tour also visits the Apollo 17 landing site. Incredibly, the lander and rover are visible in LRO’s images, as well as the tracks left behind by the astronauts and the rover.

Visualization by Ernie Wright
Duration: 4:56

Stratospheric Ozone Intrusion

At high altitudes, ozone naturally forms a protective layer around Earth that shields its living inhabitants from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. This same invisible gas is a pollutant in the lower atmosphere, one that can cause respiratory distress and is subject to monitoring and regulation. In this visualization, the results of a computer simulation of the atmosphere show that high-altitude ozone can descend all the way to the ground under the right atmospheric conditions. Since such events can trigger pollution alarms and regulatory attention, it is vital to understand which events are natural and which are generated by human activity.

Visualization by Trent Schindler
Narrated by Trent Schindler
Duration: 1:32

A Candid Look at NASA's "Living Planet"

Data from multiple Earth science missions was used to create a stunning time-lapse of plant life on land and in the sea over the last two decades. This visualization is a portrait of our living Earth and a testament to the power of unbroken, continuous data collection that is invaluable to the study of life on Earth.

Visualization by Alex Kekesi
Edited by Lauren Ward
Narrated by Alex Kekesi, Compton Tucker, Gene Feldman, and Lauren Ward
Duration: 5:29

Solar Wind Strips the Martian Atmosphere

Mars is a global desert with an atmosphere too thin to support bodies of flowing water, but evidence shows that ancient Mars was considerably wetter. Mars may have lost its thick atmosphere without a global magnetic field to prevent the incoming solar wind from depleting the upper atmosphere. This video depicts a computer simulation of this process and compares it to the actual observations from NASA's MAVEN mission orbiting Mars. The simulation shows that the impact of the solar wind particles (in pale yellow) creates "fountains" of fast-moving oxygen ions (in green and yellow) out of the Martian atmosphere. Data from MAVEN is shown to agree very well with these predictions.

Visualization by Greg Shirah and Horace Mitchell
Edited by Joy Ng
Narrated by Joy Ng
Duration: 1:30

Seasonal Changes in Carbon Dioxide

Carbon dioxide is released to the atmosphere both through human activities and by natural exchange with the land and ocean. This visualization provides a high-resolution, three-dimensional view of a year of global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. To show the complexity of carbon dioxide’s flow, the height of Earth’s atmosphere and topography have been vertically exaggerated by 400 times (this is why mountain ranges appear exceptionally elevated). In reality, the layers of Earth’s atmosphere are much more compressed than they seem here, and, in a true-to-scale visualization, these layers would appear too close together to see how dynamically this greenhouse gas actually moves up through the atmosphere.

Visualization by Greg Shirah and Horace Mitchell
Edited by Stuart Snodgrass
Narrated by Joy Ng
Duration: 1:20

Disappearing Ice

In this visualization, the issue of the declining sea ice near the North Pole is set in its natural configuration. An analysis of the age of the Arctic sea ice indicates that it traditionally became older while circulating in the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska and was then primarily lost in the warmer regions along the eastern coast of Greenland. In recent years, however, warmer water in the Beaufort Sea, possibly from the Bering Strait, often melts away the sea ice in the summer before it can get older.

Visualization by Cindy Starr
Edited by Stuart Snodgrass
Narrated by Walt Meier and Lauren Ward
Duration: 3:27

Tracking Volcanic Ash

When a volcano erupts, the ash and sulfur dioxide from the eruption can move immense distances driven by high altitude winds. As a result, the location of the volcano relative to wind patterns is important when predicting the effect of volcano emissions on airplane flights. In this visualization, emissions from an eruption of Chile's Calbuco volcano in April 2015 are tracked from South America to Africa with both satellite measurements and simulations. Simulations tend to provide the most information about the movement of the aerosol and chemical emissions, but the agreement between simulation and observation shows that the simulations are providing real-world information that can be used for the health and safety of airline passengers during actual events.

Visualization by Kel Elkins
Narrated by Jefferson Beck
Duration: 1:36

Bennu's Journey

How can one small asteroid encapsulate the history of the solar system? Scientists explore such questions and artists bring them to dramatic life. This video is a six-minute animated movie about NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, asteroid Bennu, and the formation of our solar system. Born from the rubble of a violent collision, hurled through space for millions of years, asteroid Bennu has had a tough life in a rough neighborhood — the early solar system. "Bennu's Journey" shows what is known and what remains mysterious about the evolution of Bennu and the planets. By retrieving a sample of Bennu, OSIRIS-REx will teach us more about the raw ingredients of the solar system and our own origins.

Visualization by Walt Feimer and Michael Lentz of NASA's Conceptual Image Lab
Edited by Rich Melnick and Michael Lentz
Narrated by Jason Charles Miller
Duration: 6:00

Earthrise: The 45th Anniversary

The photo "Earthrise" was taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts while orbiting the moon, and is one of the most important pictures ever taken. It had a global impact and is often credited with starting the environmental movement. Surprisingly, there was confusion as to who actually took the picture. This project was started to demonstrate the accuracy of data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, but it eventually morphed into an investigation into the acquisition of the famous image. Watch the video to learn the fascinating story behind the image and the visualization work that solved the mystery of how it was taken.

Visualization by Ernie Wright
Edited by Dan Gallagher
Narrated by Andrew Chaikin
Duration: 6:53

Acknowledgements

The Scientific Visualization Studio and the Conceptual Image Lab are located at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt MD USA. The visualizations and animations created by these two groups are free for use by the public and are available through our websites at svs.gsfc.nasa.gov and cilab.gsfc.nasa.gov.

Pictured top: The staff of the Scientific Visualization Studio in 2018
Back row from left: Britt Griswold, Cindy Starr, Kel Elkins, Horace Mitchell, Greg Shirah, Ernie Wright, Leann Johnson
Front row from left: Larry Schuler, Cheng Zhang, Stuart Snodgrass, Ian Jones, Eric Sokolowsky, Trent Schindler, Joycelyn Jones, Alex Kekesi, Lori Perkins, Tom Bridgman, Helen-Nicole Kostis

Pictured bottom: The staff of the Conceptual Image Lab in 2018
From left: Walt Feimer, Michael Lentz, Chris Meaney, Brian Monroe, Adriana Manrique Gutierrez, Krystofer Kim, Josh Masters