1-Click Satellite Data

This ESIP-inspired tool was developed to provide a free, simple way for the average person to view current satellite data, at any Earth location, from a web browser. For the curious technophile, what follows is a high-level description of the implementation. The client side was written as a Java applet to meet the requirement of working in a web browser. Flex/ActionScript (i.e., Flash) may have been a better choice to achieve higher web browser acceptance - maybe a later version. The applet communicates to a Java servlet running on the web server the page was loaded from. The servlet uses the VisAD library (freely available from the University of Wisconsin Space Science and Engineering Center) to request the actual data from an appropriate server via the ADDE protocol, and returns the data just like a normal web server would return a GIF image.

You can try it out here.

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