3-D scientific visualizations have been created in the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) from selected parameters of the NASA/National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) Coordinated Heliospheric Observations (COHO) Interplanetary spacecraft measurements. The 2-D Time Series plots (column 2 in table below) were created with the COHOWeb data system and the 3-D VRML worlds (column 3) were generated directly from the COHO data files. The spacecraft position and plasma measurements were converted to a 3-D scene using the 3-D coordinates and a scaled color range of a selected parameter. The 3-D origin is the Sun and the axes are 1 AU (astronomical units) in length, which is the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The positional VRML scenes contain each point representing the 3-D coordinates of the spacecraft over a period of time and a colored point or cube represents a measurement such as plasma temperature or plasma velocity scaled from 0 to 255 to visualize the variations with respect to the spacecraft position at the time of measurement.
Note that the VRML files have been compressed with the gzip utility to reduce download time and the number in parentheses (e.g. 20K) indicates the compressed file size in bytes, which is approximately 10% of the original uncompressed size.
If you cannot view VRML files then there are some sample screen shots of how it looks like in WebSpace. Also see a sample GIF of a VRML scene of the Ulysses spacecraft position and plasma velocity measurements from 1990 to 1993, and view a sample GIF of Pioneer 11 data in VRML. More details about the visualizations are also available.
You must have a VRML browser to view these 3-D scenes such as WebSpace.
See COHOWeb for more information about the science data
See SGI WebSpace sites for more information about VRML
