Deep space exploration on your home computer

With the successful (and not really that successful) landing of the mars explorers launched by NASA (and ESA), there also is a big interest in findings. Pictures taken by the mars rover “Spirit” made it through the news, and it definitely is a huge success to be able to view the surface of the red planet in such detail. Pictures from earlier missions that just passed by the planet could only give an idea of how the surface really looks like. Now we will have to see what results the close-up examination of those rocks will reveal.
But not only can you look at some of the pictures taken, no, the scientists let us experience the real feeling of this mission. The software used to control the mars rover is available for download for all major platforms. You can also download the first data-package that contains images and data gathered from Spirit after its landing. You have several different views taken with the various onboard cameras. There even is a basic three-d rendering of the ground around the landing site that you can rotate and zoom. The high resolution images are definitely the most impressive ones though. Updates of new data are supposed to be released regularly.
Now if you need some help finding Mars on your stellar roadmap, then there is another really impressive (and free!) program that gives you a live rendered 3d universum you can freely move through and explore. It is called Calestia and has a real impressive list of features. Not only is it very comprehensive (at least it seems so to me :), but it uses some really neat visualisation that makes your space travel feel very real actually.
If you are at least vaguely interested in astronomy these programs should make for a few hours of excitement.