NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

Global CO2 ppm for January-March of 2020. This camera move zooms in on the eastern United States.This is a super-wide screen format for 5x3 tiled display walls.

Rendering of CO2 concentration over the eastern United States (#5196)

PACE orbiting the Earth showing OCI, HARP2, and SPEXone instument fields of view followed by instrument ground swath patterns

Visualization of PACE orbiting the earth, drawing swathes of color behind it. (PACE Gallery)

Shortly after atmospheric entry, the capsule undergoes maximum heating.

Rendering of the OSIRIS-REx mission entering Earth's atmosphere (#20381)

Ocean currents of the Gulf Stream.

Ocean currents of the Gulf Stream. (#11003)

An image of the NASA Earth Information Center. It is a large wall-sized display with two circular screens on either side of a large rectangular one. It is currently displaying a series of globes covered in an orange fog, representing the flow of carbon dioxide across the planet.

NASA's Earth Information Center, located in the east lobby of the NASA Headquarters building.

New simulations carried out on the NASA Center for Climate Simulation’s Discover supercomputer show how weaker, low-luminosity jets produced by a galaxy's monster black hole interact with their galactic environment. Because these jets are more difficult to detect, the simulations help astronomers link these interactions to features they can observe, such as various gas motions and optical and X-ray emissions.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMusic credit: "Lost Time;" "Ascension;" "Flowing Cityscape;" "Jupiter's Eye;" "Pizzicato Piece;" "Facts;" "Final Words" all from Universal Production MusicVideo Descriptive Text available.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available.

Simulation of black hole jets coming from the centers of galaxies. (#14217)

Sample Composite that split screens the lidar swath over the El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico. During the split screen, 2017 data is on the upper left and 2018 data on the bottom right. As the camera moves northwest, the viewer can see patches of ground becoming visible in the 2018 data. This is due to the vast numbers of trees that were stripped or fell during Hurricane Maria in September 2017.

LIDAR view of Puerto Rico's El Yunque National Forest. (#4624)

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) spotted 11 significant flares on the Sun from August 12-18, 2022. Here's what that looked like at 171 angstroms, one of the wavelengths of light that SDO captures.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/SDOMusic: "Rhombus" from Geometric Shapes. Written and produced by Lars Leonhard.Watch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available.

Solar flares coming off of the Sun. (#14202)

LRO Beauty Shot

Rendering of NASA's LRO orbiting the Moon. (#20369)

Recently released

  • NASA Science category

  • Page type

See more recently released visualizations

Currently popular

  • NASA Science category

  • Page type

See more currently popular visualizations

More ways to browse

Search
By person
By keyword
By dataset

Our Mission

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio produces visualizations, animations, and images in order to promote a greater understanding of Earth and Space Sciences. We work closely with scientists — both within the NASA community, and within the broader academic research community — to create high-quality, data-backed visualizations.

About Us

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio is based out of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), located in Greenbelt, Maryland. The core studio consists of a team of (approximately) 15 visualizers, some of whom have been working with the studio for almost 30 years. The SVS's visualizers specialize in a wide variety of disciplines — astronomy, planetary science, climatology, cartography, and 3D modeling (to name a few) — but are united by a common love of making science accessible.

History

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio was founded by Jim Strong at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in 1990. Jim would soon be joined in 1991 by visualizer Horace Mitchell, who would go on to head the department all the way until his retirement in 2019. The studio was originally founded to create visualizations to go alongside NASA research publications – which still constitute the vast majority of the studio’s work to this day. In the studio’s early days, much of our work focused on creating (near) real-time visualizations: grabbing data from NASA satellites, processing it as rapidly as possible, and producing high-quality, more digestible visualizations.

By 1997, the studio’s focus shifted from real-time visualization technologies (that were primarily research-oriented) towards non-real-time, pre-rendered visualizations aimed towards public outreach. Around this time, the studio also began working closely with the NASA Public Affairs Office (now Office of Communications) to get our visualizations out to a wide variety of news outlets, film production companies, and academic institutions.

By 2001, we had developed an extensive library of Betacam-SP tapes (NTSC) and needed a more easily-accessible way for the public to access our content. Thus, the SVS website was born. Since its inception, the SVS website has served as both a historical archive of our works and a place to keep up with the current research of NASA’s Earth and Space Science divisions. Around this time, the SVS also began working closely with our partner groups Conceptual Image Labs (CI Labs) and Goddard Media Studios (GMS) to publish a more diverse array of content. The website would formally begin hosting content from these two groups in 2006.

Conceptual Image Labs focuses more on the artistic side of things – producing high-fidelity renders using film animation and visual design techniques. Where the SVS primarily focuses on making data-based visualizations, CI Labs puts more emphasis on conceptual visualizations – producing animations featuring NASA spacecraft, planetary observations, and simulations.

Goddard Media Studios, on the other hand, is more focused towards public outreach – producing interviews, TV programs, and documentaries. GMS continues to be the main producers behind NASA TV, and as such, much of their content is aimed towards the general public.

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, the SVS experimented with a wide variety of nascent virtual reality technologies. The work from this time period would later be repurposed and spun off into the NASA Hyperwall project: a multi-screen, high-resolution, wall-sized display. The Hyperwall would later be adopted for NASA public outreach efforts: traveling around the world to various conferences and being used for museum exhibits, scientific presentations, and multimedia shows. The website would begin formally hosting NASA Hyperwall content in 2010.

Our Content Partners

The logo of Conceptual Image Labs: a black sphere with the text 'C.I.L. Conceptual Image Lab' engraved into it.

Conceptual Image Lab (CI Labs)

NASA's CI Lab is an award-winning studio with artists who work closely with astronomers, scientists and engineers to bring scientific theory, design and concepts to life in an accurate, yet visually compelling way.

A picture of people in a TV studio. On the left side of the image, there are a number of cameras and recording equipment. On the right, there is a set with people standing in front of an image of the Earth, taken from orbit. The logo of Goddard Media Studios is overlayed on the picture.

Goddard Media Studios (GMS)

With a passionate commitment for broadly sharing NASA’s bold research initiatives, The Goddard Media Studio tells stories like no one else in the universe. Fielding an impressive team of producers, animators, editors, and more, The Studio fuses hard science with exciting imagination to explain, translate, and ultimately inspire.

A picture of a man in front of the NASA hyperwall -- a wall-sized display composed of many smaller screens. The hyperwall is currently displaying a map of the Earth covered in clouds. The text 'hyperwall' is overlayed on the picture.

Scientific Hyperwall Presentations

The Hyperwall is a big beautiful “wall" of high-definition screens used to display NASA’s latest and greatest data visualizations, images, videos, and other presentation material, and is a primary outreach platform for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Existing Hyperwall stories highlight themes in Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics. The Scientific Visualization Studio developed the Hyperwall software.

Frequently Asked Questions

All of our content is in the public domain (unless otherwise noted), meaning that it is free to download, use, and redistribute for whatever purposes you see fit. For more information, see NASA’s media usage guidelines.

Note: some of our visualizations feature licensed music, which is not in the public domain. In these instances, the visualizations themselves are still in the public domain, meaning you're allowed to use them without the associated audio tracks. Individual visualizations will make note of this where applicable.

  • Videos – Primarily .mp4 and .webm. Some of our older content is also available in .mpg and .dv.
  • Frames – Most of our visualizations are accompanied by directories containing individual frames. These are generally released as .exr or .tiff.
  • Images – .jpg, .png, or .tiff.

The exact software used for visualizations varies from visualizer to visualizer, but here are some popular ones:

  • 3D modeling / animation – Maya, Houdini
  • Rendering – Pixar Renderman, SideFX Mantra
  • Scripting – Python / C / IDL / C++

Fun fact! We were very early adopters of Python. Some of our early visualizations (2000 ~ 2002) were written in Python 1.6. The SVS was also a fairly early adopter of Renderman. Our first Renderman visualization (released in 2002) was created using BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tools), a Renderman compliant renderer.

Have a question not on this list? Please