Google to join NASA's space program

Adam Turner
Monday, 18 December 2006 05:27

Your IT - Home IT

Google will boldly go where no search engine has gone before, joining NASA's space program to make wealth of space data and imagery more easily available to the world under a deal to be announced Monday.

NASA has scheduled a press conference for 11.00am Monday PST (5.00am Tuesday AEST) to announce "details of Space Act Agreement with Google". Space Act Agreements are NASA research and development agreements under which the space agency makes "facilities, expertise, or equipment, technology, etc." freely available to other parties on the understanding the result is "relevant to a NASA mission or program requirement". The program is expected to make NASA's space data and imagery more easily available, reports SpaceRef.

Apart from a brief announcement of the press conference, both Google and NASA are keeping their cards close to their chest. The fact a Space Act Agreement must be relevant to a NASA mission or program requirement would indicate the search engine giant is to play a key role one of NASA's programs - perhaps the establishment of a lunar base, the exploration of Mars or the completion of the International Space Station.

The press conference 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.