Bringing space exploration down to Earth

NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of technical problems. These could range from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing to human-computer interfaces.

As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA's information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualisation and forecasting, high-resolution 3D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.

Recently, teams from NASA and Google met to discuss the many computer science problems facing both organisations and possible joint collaborations that could help address them.

NASA and Google intend to collaborate in a variety of areas, including

incorporating agency data sets in Google Earth, focusing on user studies and cognitive modelling for human computer interaction, and science data search utilising a variety of Google features and products.