Photos

• JPL Photojournal

  

  Photos of solar system planets and their moons. Some mercator projections of planetary surfaces, some photos from space, some artists’ conceptions. This is a rich resource, there are multiple ways to browse through this data.

  

  Here’s a starting point for more advanced browsing. For example, you can browse photos of a single planet. Or you can look at the pictures from a particular mission. Or you can do a full text search for some specific place.

• HIRISE Catalog

  
  

  HIRISE is a camera mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been taking extremely high-resolution pictures of Mars for the past 3 years. “Explore Mars, one giant image at a time” is the site’s motto, and it definitely lives up to it. Some of these look utterly unreal in the closeups, and the full image covers a vast area. Be sure to check out the papers written based off of the images to put them into context.

• Apollo Panoramas

  

  Beautiful panoramas taken by Apollo astronauts, would be great for cube maps and skyboxes.

• Raw Mars Images

  

  It’s simple. We look at pictures of Curiosity’s cameras, and click on the day number to see all the pictures that camera took that day. It’s like you’re down there on the surface of Mars with it.

Photos

• PlanetQuest

  

  Many artists’ concepts populate this page, which is all about the search for exoplanets. There are also a few photographs of real exoplanets, and charts describing their expected climates. Use the navigation sidebar to fully explore all the options.

• Great Images in NASA

  

  Thousands of photographs of historical interest. Images of aircraft, spacecraft, ships, famous pilots, and, yes, an astronaut holding a “for sale” sign while spacewalking.

• Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth

  

  A collection of many photos taken by astronauts. From the captivating long exposures taken by Don Pettit on the ISS last year to the first photographs of the entire disc of the Earth by a human hand, it seems to be pretty comprehensive. Browse it by using the “Collections” menu on the left. The Earth Observatory collection is kind of a “best of”. In case you, like me, immediately went searching for volcanoes, there’s an entire collection of them.
  
  Pro tip: “pan glint” means “the ocean looks freakin’ awesome”

• NASA JSC’s Flickr

  NASA HQ’s Flickr

  NASA Goddard’s Flickr

  NASA on the Commons Flickr

  NASA Marshall’s Flickr

  

  These NASA Flickr pages often contain photos of ground-based activities (JSC has every picture of the shuttle being transported, it seems), but they also often have really interesting space-based photos that might not be so easy to find elsewhere. Also, rocket engines.

  

Models

• NASA 3D Resources

  

  Textured Models of spacecraft, spacesuits, aircraft, tools, and more. Many are in Blender format (these tend to be the ones with the grey backgrounds). Other formats include FBX, OBJ, MAX, 3DS, and MB.

  There are varying ways of importing these if you’re using Unity. Most require that the corresponding 3D application is installed (.MAX, .3DS = 3D Studio Max, .MB = Maya, .BLEND = Blender). Unity has a tendency to import meshes really small, so make sure to check the scale factor on the import inspector.

• K10 Rover Model, in 3DS format and in 2 different color schemes.

  MER Model

  SmartSPHERES Model

Audio

Collection of sounds of celestial bodies

Signal data from spacecraft instruments that has been converted into sound files. mp3 format.

Historic Audio clips

Videos/Animations

JPL Animations

Artist animations, downloadable as either MP4 or MOV files.

Time lapse videos of Earth

Video taken from spacecraft as they orbit Earth, downloadable as MOV files.

Other Stuff

data.NASA This is the motherlode of all data sets that NASA puts out.

Mars Orbital Data Explorer

Lunar Orbital Data Explorer

Images from nearly every mission to Mars and the Moon, organized on giant maps.

Heightmap of the Hadley Rille valley on the moon, with aligned texture. It’s one enormous pair of TIFFs, to use it in Unity you use Photoshop to crop out a region of interest and save as RAW.

Planet Makeover

Input basic variables and create a planet. Export a jpg image of the planet you make.

Trajectory Data, contains orbital location information for various spacecraft.

Heating Calculator for compressed gas, featured in the steak XKCD what-if.