Google blasts off with NASA on virtual flights

By Adam Turner
Tuesday, 19 December 2006 01:04

Science - Space

Google Earth flyovers of the moon and Mars will be part of a NASA agreement with Google to make the space agency's wealth of information more easily available to the public.

Tracking of the International Space Station and space shuttle activity as well as real-time weather forecasting and visualisation are also part of the agreement, as first reported by SpaceRef. In the long term, Google with work with NASA on technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing to human-computer interfaces.

"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," said NASA Administrator Michael Griffin. "This innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA's space exploration work accessible to everyone."

NASA and Google also are finalising details for additional collaborations that include joint research, products, facilities, education and missions.

The annoucement comes days after NASA’s climatologists announced plans to release atmospheric data for the Google Earth mapping application. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory demonstrated a prototype of "iEarth" at last week’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Set to be available in April, according to New Scientist, iEarth will draw data from the Earth Observing System, a network of a satellites, weather balloons and ground-based sensors collecting data such as air temperatures, water-vapour densities and aerosol concentrations.