[Paraview] Modeling a earth sphere

[Ju]

Good afternoon,
    I am new to working with paraview and heard about the group mailing 
list, so I hope I stumbled into the right place.  I am in need of some 
hopeful reliable references or advice that anyone can give so thank you 
in advance.

I am currently working on a project that will visualize current 
satellite trajectory around the earth using data obtained from a novatel 
OEM4 GPS receiver.  I thought it would be pretty neat if I could 
actually have a representation of earth as opposed to just creating a 
'sphere' to use as the body of mass for the satellites.

As opposed to tools like matlab that there are function calls, I am 
unsure that paraview has such a feature.  As primitive a request as this 
may seem, what if any, resources have people used to make model earth? 
Are you able to use textures on your model as well using paraview?

As a side note,
  Hopeful continuation of this project beyond my course, I was also told 
that there is a beta version of a real-time paraview in the works that 
would ideally take-in realtime data for visualization.  Can anyone 
elaborate on this a bit more?

Thank you in advance,

~Julian