Forget Mars; NASA’s new Exoplanet Travel Bureau lets you travel to new planets much, much further away.
This new website puts exoplanets — planets that are outside of our solar system — within reach with the help of VR. You can journey to three new worlds and explore a 360 degree rendition of each. Note that these aren’t actual images of each planet, but instead artist impressions of what they could look like based on existing data.
You can take a trip to the neon-soaked sights of Trappist-1e, the lonely surface of Kepler-186f and admire the peaks of Kepler-16b. Each surface has annotations explaining various features. Special shout out also goes to the posters you can download for each, which look absolutely incredible.
If you have a compatible smartphone and VR viewer than you can take a trip to these new worlds as if you were really there, though we’d love to see these starting steps used for something deeper.
Some of us will be lucky to see humans landing on Mars in our lifetime, but we’re far, far off from coming into contact with these exoplanets, so it’s great to see NASA bringing us that bit closer to them now. This is just one of several immersive reality projects NASA has in the works, including partnering with other developers to bring us to Mars, the ISS and more.
