Eyes on the Solar System

Eyes on the Solar System ( EotSS ) is a software for the simulation and presentation of realistic views of spacecraft, planets, comets, and other special features of our solar system. It was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL ) of NASA, which also provides the current data for the software and the program previously Eyes on the Earth 3D developed. The software has been developed since its publication in 2010 and based since mid-2012 on Java, making it platform independent. EotSS uses the Unity ( game engine ). The software can be compared, among others, NASA World Wind, Stellarium, Celestia, being part there are very big differences.

The display of almost all celestial bodies (stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, etc. ) and all civilian spacecraft together with their orbits and missions is possible. Zoom function as well as an interactive timeline on the desired constellation of the solar system for all times of the past, present, can be adjusted ( real-time ) and the future, enable the control in the 3D view (which also stereoscopic (3D) with 3D Glasses ( can be anaglyph, red-cyan ) is displayed ).

The previous highest number of users and therefore greatest access to the server for the stream data was during the boarding and landing of the Curiosity rover. Additional 739,000 users used this weekend EotSS and 20 terabytes of data was streamed on the JPL server. The contact surface of Mars rover was previously predicted weeks by a team for the planning of trajectories for spacecraft and was down to a fraction of a second accurate.

In December 2011, the software of NASA employees Jon Nguyen was presented at a TED conference TEDx in San Diego.