NASA-Google partnership ready for liftoff
First priority is improving the availability of NASA data on the Internet.
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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.