Frequently Asked Questions:

About
How to buy
Details & Tips

About

What is Earth Explorer?
Earth Explorer is an interactive 3D earth surface browser with amazing imagery and vast geography information. As a high resolution interactive 3D world map, Earth Explorer providing detailed geography information including countries, cities, coastlines, islands, lakes, rivers, and political boundaries. You can observe our mother planet with pretty terrain from very far to very near, locate a city or town by it's name, calculate distance between any two points, or auto-rotating the whole globe etc.

What are the key features of Earth Explorer?
Below is the key features of Earth Explorer:

• 3D global view with 50m resolution satellite imagery and 1km res shaded relif DEM (digital elevation model) imagery convered entire earth;
• Inlucding 267 countries and regions, 40000+ cities, 15000+ islands, 1700+ noteworthy historical earthquakes and vector layers including political boundaries, coastlines, rivers, longitude-latitude grids;
• Measure and caclulate distance and bearing between any two points, find a particular country, city, island by name;
• Config to show day/night shadow effect, adjust Gamma to control lumination, or choose a star space as background;
• Integrate Topographic view and satellite view in a program seamlessly and has a perfect blend view of the two.(Only provide with professional version);
• Real-time deliver high resolution data to your desktop and provide offline version;
• Easy-to-use user interfaces;

What is Earth Explorer DEM?
Earth Explorer DEM use shaded relief topographical imagery built from 30-arc-second (1-km) gridded, quality-controlled global Digital Elevation Model (DEM) to replace the satellite imagery used in the Earth Explorer. Through combination with the world map information Earth Explorer DEM providing a detailed view of our mother planet earth.

What is the differences between Earth Explorer five versions?
See a version comparisons here.

How does it work?
Earth Explorer is a easy-to-use software. When you exploring the high detailed earth surface with plenty geography information, data is streamed to you PC from the online web database and cached to your disk. With the multi-resolution and tiled image technology, you can access this huge information set and don't need to worry about your computer's memory limit.

What can I do with it?
Earth Explorer providing detailed geography information including countries, cities, coastlines, islands, lakes, rivers, and political boundaries.You can browser the high detailed earth surface, finding and locate a country or city by it's name, or calculate distance between any two points, or just take it as a very high resolution world map.

What is the difference between Earth Explorer Standard Version and Earth Explorer Full Version?
Earth Explorer Standard Version only including a part of needed data file in it's install package, and it need to access online database in our website when you exploring the high resolution data collection. We implemented a disk caching mechanism to speed up this procedure. Earth Explorer Full Version including all funtions standard has, beside this it including all needed data files in it's install package, and it does not need internet access, it is more fast and fluent than the standard version.

What are the system requirements?
1) Windows 98, WindowsNT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP;
2) PII266 or faster processor;
3) 64MB RAM at minimum, 128 MB or more is recommended.
4) 20MB of free hard disk space and more is recommended.
5) Your screen resolution should be 24bit color and ideally, at least 800 x 600.

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Is your online order form secure?
Yes, it is 100% secure.

Is tech support free?
Yes! It's free for all.

Does it accept phone, fax and Eurocheques orders?
Yes, it does. please visit here for detail information.

I have purchased Earth Explorer, but I can't register it correctly, what can I do?
First, please confirm you have downloaded and installed the correct version. The correct download link is included in the electronic email for serial number and license key. Second, please COPY and PASTE the serial number and license key to the proper fields instead of typed them in. If the problem still exist, please contact our support at support@motherplanet.com.

Details & Tips

What is difference between registered version and un-registered version?
Registered version can access higher resolution images and more detailed geography information than un-registered version. Registered version provide a 100 times details than unregistered version.

What is difference between Satellite View, Topographic View and Blend View?
See a comparision here.

Does the un-registered version has a date expire limit?
Yes, you can try it for 30 days. If you like it, please register it.

Does Earth Explorer need an active internet connection?
Earth Explorer 3.5 and Earth Explorer DEM 3.5 is a online version, they need an interactive internet connection to access high resolution data from Motherplanet database, Earth Explorer 3.5 Full, Earth Explorer DEM 3.5 Full and Earth Explorer 3.5 Professional is both offline version, they doesn't need. See a comparision here.

What is the maximum resolution of the earth surface image?
Earth Explorer provide a true color imagery cover entire earth globe at 1km resolution. See a comparision of different resolution here.

What is the meaning of 1km resolution?
1km resolution is meaning a point in the picture represent a 1km*1km square in the real earth surface. In this resolution you couldn't see house and streets in the map. See a comparision of different resolution here.

What is the size of the original image?
The image data of earth explorer is built from the orignal 1km resolution picture from the nasa's Blue Marble site. The original size of this picture is 43,200(width)*21,600(height), it is near 2.6GB data in uncompress format.

Could I find my street name in the Earth Explorer map?
No, you could not find any street name in the Earth Explorer map.

Can I use keyboard to control the exploring?
Yes, You can use PageUp, PageDown, Left, Right, Up and Down key to control exploring the whole earth.

What's the word on the street?
Send us your comments! We'd love to hear from you! Email us to support@motherplanet.com

I have more questions - who should I write to?
Please send your additional questions to support@motherplanet.com.