This week saw the successful (yay!) landing of the latest Mars rover, Curiosity. If you missed the teary live landing, you can catch up on the mission details here. I don’t know about you, but I prefer this kinda thing to the Olympics.

 

In fact, in the midst of all this space fever, Google has released Street View imagery of the Kennedy Space Center. It’s the largest ‘special’ Street View collection that Google has released, and contains some great images. Check out the link for a few examples, and video.

 

But, it would be remiss for me to not get in on Olympic fever again this week, so I present to you an interesting history of the logo, combined with some visualisations based around the logo. Not entirely spatially related, but I think it’s interesting enough to warrant a look (and there are only so many medal maps that you can look at).

 

Google Maps Mania this week has highlighted an Australian map that visualises Victoria’s groundwater, including information on around 300,000 bores, and will assist groundwater researchers and water managers in the state.

 

The All Points Blog has an post that, among other weather and crowd-sourcing news, highlights a new, crowd-sourced weather map, OpenWeatherMap.org. The site requests that owners of weather stations start uploading their data to the site, which will have the data licensed under Creative Commons By-Attribution Share-Alike 2.0.

 

The OGC has put a post on its blog detailing the new OGC Australia and New Zealand Forum.
“The Forum provides a platform for highlighting and explaining the value of open standards. This includes sharing geospatial data in domains including aviation, defence, emergency management, geosciences and many others. The Forum seeks also to provide an environment that fosters collaboration and sharing between members.”