One of the most interesting Apps not included in NASA Apps is 3D Sun. This is a display interface taking the data-stream output of two satellites orbiting Sol which, between them, cover around 87% of the sun’s surface at any given time. The results are generated into a 3D image on your screen, giving you a near-realtime idea of what exactly is going on the Sun. That also gives you some great advance warning about possible disruptive events that might be about to overtake you, your computer systems, your communications networks, and and other non-hardened systems that work on electricity or magnetism. The sun is the origin of most (but not all) disruptive events that might come from space and mess with your systems, and there are factors which can mitigate even its effects on your environment. To refine the results and factor in other influences, the NASA Space Weather App gives you most of the rest of the tool set you need. It includes data sources from NOAA, GOES, and SOHO, among more.
If you are looking for some spacey ringtones or computer event sounds check out the NASA Sounds page. You can have such classics as One small step for man or Houston, we have a problem. Sources include the Mercury, Apollo, and Space Shuttle missions, as well as the ISS, and even bleeps and bloops from the likes of Sputnik or the Saturn Radio Emissions. They have MP3 and M4R formats, and include some general directions as well.
Last time I mentioned NASA’s Swiss Army Knife first App, the NASA App. This time, a few quick links to the modules they broke off from that monster and turned into stand alone quick loading tools. First off is the NASA TV streaming App, for watching in realtime, and comes in both an iPhone and HD iPad version. Then from JPL comes Space Images, with a monster collection of pictures that come in iPhone, iPad, and Android flavors. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent stand alone App for Twitter like there is in the NASA App, but there is a NASA Tweetup page that allows you to sync your mobile tweet interface of choice with other like minded space cases heading for a specific real world event. That gives you some of the functionality of the first App, but there are also some new Apps that do entirely different things: more on them next time.
In fact, they wish you would! The International Space Apps Challenge is looking for folks to create Apps for smartphones and tablets based on any aspect of space research and exploration. In fact it goes beyond that, they are looking for practical applications that will take data from space agencies around the planet and use it to resolve real world problems. Early warning of dangerous weather events as seen from satellites, air and noise pollution mapping, using networks of cell phone as a large aperture telescope are just a few of the recommended ideas. The challenge has not kicked off yet but you can sign up and start submitting ideas now.
One of the best NASA Apps is simply called the NASA App, and besides the iPhone version they also made one for Android, and rolled out an HD version for the iPad. It is a monster with a ton of functions, including launch info with countdown clocks, current mission status, a huge library of images and videos, the latest news and feature stories, the Tweet feed from the various agency sources (in fact an entire Facebook and Twitter client interface to make it easy to interact with them), a live stream from NASA TV, and so much more. This was NASA’s very first official App, and while I hail its completeness, the kitchen sink approach has its drawbacks. They did end up breaking out most of the more popular functions into their own stand alone Apps, so you didn’t have to wait for everything to load or wade through a large menu when you just wanted to check the tweets or watch the live stream for example. More on those individual Apps in the next NASA Apps entry.
The NASA Visualization Explorer is a free app that allows you to explore a lot of the science NASA is doing on space-based Earth research. Topics covered include climate change, wildfires, glaciers, hurricanes, volcanoes and more. If it can be observed from an orbital platform, they will cover it sooner or later. This is a great way to get a comprehensive overview on how the planet is doing, and it is not just raw data dumps from the satellites. There are a lot of comprehensive yet concise presentations here, including narrated slide shows and full video presentations. They claim it is for the iPad only, but I am going to see if it will run on my iTouch; it looks like they have some data-dense screens you wouldn’t be able to read the text from but most of the presentations should play just fine on the small screen. You can grab it on iTunes.