The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, known as NASA, is well-loved, by millions of people. Their Facebook page is approaching 22 million fans; Twitter has over 35 million followers. If you are a fan, you probably know they have a number of different mobile apps to let you keep up with their latest and greatest projects, including NASA Selfies, Spacecraft AR (Augmented Reality), and some 3D deep space exploration.

 .

NASA’s mobile app list is actually too long for me to list out for you here. I link to it at the end of the post, but if you are a true fan then you are going to want to check out their newest releases below. In this post, I wanted to share how the Smithsonian Institution Digitization Program Office scanned the Space Shuttle Discovery, in high, high resolution — like tens of thousands of 50 megapixel images as well as hundreds of laser scans.

 .

For the technical reader: Smithsonian 3D Digitization Office, Branch Manager, Vincent Rossi explained how they did it: “We used a Surphaser laser scanner, Z+F laser scanner, and Canon 5DsR with mounted ring-flashes for photogrammetry capture all processed in REALITYCAPTURE software. Both the laser scans and the photogrammetry was processed into the final model. As you can see from some of the pics and videos we did some shots from the ground (for the heat shield and lower sides of shuttle) but a lot of the imagery and scans was captured from big cherry pickers.”

Click here to view original web page at www.forbes.com