Space Goes Virtual With Google
Space Goes Virtual With Google
December 19, 2006: A deal announced between Google and the NASA Ames Research Centre will see the regions of space become more accessible to web users.
In the first of a series of projects under the Space Act Agreement, both Google and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Ames Research Centre will work together to make NASA’s information more readily available and easily accessible online. Although NASA already has a vast amount of material available on the Internet, the information is difficult to find and scattered across a number of locations.
With aspects of the project similar to the Google Earth and Google Moon applications, visitors will be able to view satellite images and three dimensional images of both Mars and the Moon, similar to how users currently explore their own backyard.
The project may even extend out to include real-time weather forecasting and tracking of the International Space Station as well as high-resolution 3-D maps of the Moon and Mars.
The announcement of the Space Act Agreement was made through a joint statement released by both Google and NASA. “This agreement between NASA and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars,” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said through the statement.
The deal will also see Google and NASA build on their existing relationship to tackle challenging technical problems such as large-scale data management and distributed computing. For the last nine months, the search giant has been working with NASA to pull images from the NASA resource base and provide interactive tours of Mars for web surfers.
“Partnering with NASA made perfect sense for Google,” said Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt. “It has a wealth of technical expertise and data that will be of great use to Google as we look to tack many computing issues on behalf or our users.”
The project appears to fit nicely with Google’s mission statement where Google defines its purpose is to, “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Future collaborative efforts may deal with research in to human-computer interaction, education-related partnerships and further complex computing operations.