This movie shows a lot of information about the Huygens probe as it lands on Titan. See the movieā€™s page for a description of the data sets visualized.

Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

I think this is an amazing piece of work. From the perspective of the design of the visualization, there are two things I find interesting about this video:

  1. the shear amount of information conveyed per second
  2. the use of sound (as data, not a human voice) actually added useful information

It displays many multidimensional data sets elegantly. Nearly everything in the design is displaying information (no ā€œchartjunkā€). The only thing I donā€™t like about it are the boxes that surround the information at the right. They take up a lot of ā€œinkā€ not to show any information in this dense display.

My six year old daughter was fascinated by this video; we watched it three times. She then made ā€œFloamā€ models of the Earth, the moon, Saturn, and Titan. What a great success for this video!

Anyone know if ESA/NASA/JPL/University of Arizona used IDL to do any of the pieces of this?

Link via BoingBoing.