Free Geography Tools

Information Week has an article with the provocative title above making the blogosphere rounds. It supposedly warns us about how easy it would be to blow up a satellite using a free piece of satellite tracking software called Orbitron in combination with Google Earth. If prospective Dr. Evils read the article, though, they’ll see that the inclusion of Google Earth as part of this “system” is gratuitous. Google Earth is only used to “visualize” the satellite position based on the data it gets from the Orbitron software, and would play no part in the actual shooting down. Oh, and you need an operational ground-to-space missile system as well (I have one, but it’s down right now).

There seems to be a fad these days among journalists to treat Google Earth as some kind of military threat based on its satellite imagery; this article pushes that meme to a new extreme. Still, Orbitron is a pretty cool free program for satellite tracking. And if you’re looking for a free multi-platform program to show a visually-appealing map of the night sky, there’s no beating Stellarium.

Related posts:

1. New App For Real-Time GPS Tracking In Google Earth
2. Free Satellite Imagery And Derived Data From the GLCF
3. Recap Of Google Earth Plus For Free Series
4. Most Recent MODIS Imagery In Google Earth
5. Open Source Web-Based GPS Fleet Tracking Software
6. Google Earth Plus – RIP
7. Automatic Caching Of Google Earth Data For Offline Use
8. Investigate Satellite Orbit Tracks And Coverage (Including GPS Satellite Systems) With JSatTrak
9. Near-Real-Time Georeferenced MODIS Satellite Images From The Terra/Aqua Satellites
10. Real-Time GPS Tracking In Google Earth Free – Setup
11. Real-Time GPS Tracking With Google Earth – Paid Options
12. Overlay Google Maps, Windows Live, Yahoo, Ask.com and OpenStreetMap Imagery In Google Earth
13. "Fair Use" And Google Earth Imagery
14. Plotting Swivel Data In Google Maps
15. GPS Support Added To Free Version Of Google Earth