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The Virtual Cosmos: A Public Portal to the National Virtual Observatory
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| The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) holds tremendous potential for Education and Public Outreach (EPO) opportunities. The possibilities for EPO with the NVO, which promises to make widely available the great majority of the worldÃs astronomical data, are too numerous for any one EPO effort to ever hope to develop. Therefore, it is critical that the NVO EPO program develop an infrastructure and tools flexible enough that any EPO program can make use of it. We propose to assemble the infrastructure and tools for NVO EPO and to construct the first portal that makes use of NVO resources for non-scientists. This portal, called The Virtual Cosmos, will be designed to provide the user with an integrated model of the Universe and the ability to navigate to regions of interest linked to live databases. The portal will stand as an example of many possible EPO resources that can make use of the NVO EPO infrastructure. Such a robust end-to-end prototype of an EPO interface is in the true spirit of NVO and goes beyond the traditional online portals to the various datasets. The Virtual Cosmos will inform, excite, and educate the public about space science and astronomy, and serve as a catalyst for scientific and technological literacy. |
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