The NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a formal agreement to collaborate on projects ranging from studying scientific-data search technology to using Google Earth flyovers for the moon and Mars.
The R&D partnership was announced by Google chief executive Eric Schmidt in September 2005, but a year later representatives from both Google and NASA Ames acknowledged that there were roadblocks. Monday's announcement finally solidified their agreement and gave hints as to what some upcoming products of the partnership may be.
The NASA Ames Research Center, which specializes in science and engineering projects, is located at Moffett Field in California, on former Navy land that's a stone's throw from the big names of Silicon Valley — including Google's campus in Mountain View. This year, research at NASA Ames has included heat shield technology, the commercialization of space exploration and wildfire monitoring.
The first collaboration between Google and NASA Ames will concern the availability of NASA information over the Internet. For example, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said in a statement that "soon" there will be Google Earth flyovers available for the surfaces of Mars and the moon. Additional data will include real-time weather forecasting and visualization, as well as tracking of the International Space Station and space shuttle activity.
Future NASA-Google developments in the works aren't limited to fusing NASA data into Google applications. Other planned projects mentioned in Monday's announcement deal with human-computer interaction, education-related collaborations and possibly even joint missions.
Talkback
It'll be interesting, and certainly very "cool", to have Google Moon and Google Mars. But they might consider putting their resources into Earth for a while longer. I live on the outskirts of a European capital city and yet the image resolution and out-of-date map data for my area is woeful to the point of being utterly useless.
Google Mars may well be vaguely useful as an educational tool, or to a handful of planetary scientists. Google Earth, on the other hand, is useful to anyone with a PC. Or at least, it would be if they actually finished the thing.
I think Google should focus on other useful things that will help the majority of the population rather than going on fancy adventures to moon and mars. I’m from India and Google earth hasn’t got any sort depth in the maps.
They should rather concentrate more on improving their product and helping the open source movement.
I reckon that if other commenters spent a little time on moon.google.com, zooming into the landing zones and such, people might realise just how much of a beta this site is. Rather than complaining about it and bemoaning the failings of other elements of google's empire. I myself found it very enlightening to see the structure of the moon's surface at such high definition. ;-)
Wallace and Gromit's Grand Day Out was about on the money