Public Access 3-D Viewer Puts Supernova Remnant into the Hands of the People

NASA and the Smithsonian Institution have teamed up to allow people everywhere to interact with a 3-D version of one of the sky's most famous objects, known as the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant.

The project is part of a large-scale effort to digitize many of the Smithsonian's objects and artifacts, according to NASA officials. Once completed, it will place all the data collected on "Cas A," along with a variety of other, more terrestrial objects, into the hands of the public in the form of an open-access program.

A 300-year-old remnant of a violent stellar explosion, Cas A has become the poster child for the the new project. The 3-D model of the space object combines information harvested by the agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope and ground-based facilities.

Coinciding with Cas A being featured in the new effort is the release of a new image obtained by Chandra highlighting the object's different energy bands. Low-energy X-rays are presented as red, medium-energy as green and the highest energy X-rays blue.

According to NASA, the image will help astronomers as they reconstruct the details of the supernova process, including important information such as the star's size and chemical makeup.

The only astronomical object to be featured in the Smithsonian 3-D project, Cas A is also the only supernova remnant to be modeled in 3-D. Special software was used to link the fields of astrophysics and medical imaging in order to first produce the image in 2009. And while it's offered a wealth of information to scientists since then, by providing the newly formatted data in an open source framework, the space agency hopes to increase awareness and public participation.

Other objects included in the project include the Wright brothers' plane, a 1,600-year-old stone Buddha, a gunboat from the Revolutionary War and fossil whales from Chile.