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Google And NASA To Collaborate On Technology
Mike Peel writes "The BBC reports that Google will be assisting NASA with new technology from a campus facility in the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field." From the article: "As part of the venture, Google will develop one million square feet of real estate at the Nasa Ames research centre. The centre, built in 1939, has been at the heart of the US space program for many years, conducting research into the Apollo moon missions between 1963 and 1972. Nasa recently unveiled plans to make another moon landing by 2020. Examples of areas of potential collaboration include the development of new types of remote sensors and improving analysis of engineering problems." More details available from the official press release and MSNBC.
A giant leap for google kind towards the Copernicus Center
liqbase
http://moon.google.com/ and http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
Argh.
They're going to replace all of NASA's chairs with inflatable exercise balls.
One million square feet! is certainly a lots of real estate space (no pun intended) that in the South Bay Area has to be worth a not insignificant chunk of change. Granted, Moffett field sits on an amazing amount of land and although I have not been back to the base for years, I imagine it is still some pretty choice real estate that just so happens to be right up the road from Google.
It also might be of interest to note that Moffett is right next door to a former NIMA (NRO) facility and given Google's interest in mapping the surface of the Earth and other remote sensing activities, might be pretty convenient.
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It's just a glorified real-estate leasing deal, which will use up some of the office space created by the latest layoffs at NASA-Ames:
7 63469.htm
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/12
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Small step for a huge firm to help NASA with some real estate.
Huge freaking text ad on the MOON!
You can't handle the truth.
They really are trying to search everything, aren't they?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
This brings a whole new meaning to Google Earth.
;)
I mean we all know their main business is adverts
"Mission Control, this is Mars Pathfinder 1, we are experiencing minor power fluctuations on bus C and require some diagnostic advice, over..."
"Pathfinder 1, roger that, wait one..."
"Pathfinder, this is Mission Control, please surf to history.nasa.gov/ap13rb/ch4pt.2.pdf. If you need a copy of Acrobat Reader please advise and I will supply the URL, over..."
AT&ROFLMAO
Google wants to do so many cool things, from scanning the world's books to helping us in space. But now that it's public it's only a matter of time before the stock holders start pulling back the reins. In the narrow view of the stock market it doesn't matter if you help people. It doesn't even matter if you make a profit. The sole thing that matters to the stock market is whether you're growing. That's it. If you're not focusing on that, you're out.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
For a second there when I saw "Google and NASA collaborating on technology" I had a vain hope that it would be a reference to NASA World Wind. For those unsure (any Google Earth users), NASA World Wind is basically the same thing, only that it was around much earlier and (more importantly) it's open source software. On the down side, no expensive up-to-date imagery.
Well, to make that big search engine, they needed a big supercomputer, which they built themselves by networking a lot of computers together, didn't they? I mean, they might beat NSA at raw computing power. And a supercomputer, programmed differently, could run all sorts of high-power simulations and could correlate all sorts of sensory data.
Then there is the fact that Google is so adaptable that simply having them on the team gives NASA a boost. Google has done pretty much everything Internet related in the last few years, and that requires organizational flexibility. Maybe NASA wants to get an idea of how they work?
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence will be replaced by Google for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
One of the first fruits of the Google/NASA pairing will be the gShuttle. The existing space shuttle will be modified to store 10x the amount the previous shuttle could (though no details yet from NASA as to why they need that much space and if they'd actually use it). The new shuttle would also bring up paid advertisments based on various criteria, the formula for which Google has not made public. Another gShuttle innovation would be a radically simplier control and navigation system. The pilots will not simply type in their commands to the shuttle (e.g. "rearThrusters:fire burntime:10"). One particularly interesting feature is the "I feel lucky" button on the navigation console, no specifics as to the exact function of this button was put forth by the Google spokesdrone.
right on! now I'll be able to to search the moon and it'll be powered by google! next it'll be the gRocket!
Bell Labs was heavily involved in the Apollo moon landing program. In both a technical capacity and a project management capacity. I remember early on, going to a meeting for new employees where all the senior managers introduced themselves and talked about their background. Years earlier, most of them had worked together on the Apollo moon landing.
Google has formed Google Labs including a lot of folks formerly from Bell Labs. It's interesting that NASA is working with them on the Moon Landing 2.0. Hopefully, without the bureaucracy of an AT&T, Google Labs will be more successful at translating R&D into marketable product. So far, their early track record looks very promising.
[Insert pithy quote here]
A merger of the buzzwords that drive the investors of today.
Google and NASA in the same /. story! Will they be using linux or some other open source software? If so, then we may have the Perfect /. Story!!
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
As you head out into the solar system and attempt to settle elsewhere, one of the problems is that you won't be able to google a query back to Earth and get a lightning fast response. (Well, uh, perhaps as fast as lightning, but that could be seconds, minutes, or hours....) You no longer can present every problem to Mission Control and wait for an answer. And you probably will not have trained for every scenario.
Survival of a small colony of smart people on the Moon or Mars could partly depend on taking large portions of your planetary knowledge base with you and looking for solutions that others have figured out but you haven't. (It also is a form of taking your culture with you.) The trick is to do it without rooms of massive power-hungry clusters, but for a smaller group of users. I can imagine Google working with NASA to pull some of these technologies together. Things like nanotechnology, one of the focal points of work at Ames, will be key to making it happen.
Does anyone else think that maybe we're just in a Google-bubble, much like the internet bubble of the late 90s? I mean c'mon! Yeah, they wrote a search engine and they've made enough money to create a developer utopia where their programmers can be paid to work on thier own personal projects. Yeah, they have several other products out which utilize the internet in various ways. So now NASA, a government agency, is looking to spend taxpayer dollars to team up with Google... so they can bring the Apollo mission search results when we ask for them? And perform research into fields that Google only has money to due to an excessive amount of over speculation? Give me a break.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
Ok, Google is a company based around providing Search services, and they do that well. All thier services are in some way related to information mining (searching), from web search, to geographical search, it's all search in the end.
But what incredible need does NASA have for a partner to provide search? Sure, data mining is a useful tool for NASA I'm sure, but why do they need Google to actually set up shop there with them to do this?
Seems to me like Google is expanding out of it's domain. And that's not usually a good thing. Pick one thing and do it well, don't try to be Jack of all trades.
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NASA has big archives of space data, and they're only going to get bigger - the next generation of earth observing satellites are expected to generate 4 petabytes/year. That's 4 * 10**15, folks - think 8,000 500 GB drives. Per year. For at least the next ten years. One year is on the order of the size of Google's web cache.
Current archives are merely huge, and off-the-shelf databases are having trouble indexing it all - I've heard of a database holding just metadata (date/time, geographic extent, data type, resolution, format, etc.) for millions of observations where queries were taking tens of seconds, and this was with top-of-the-line commercial database software with all the spatial search bells and whistles.
If anybody can come up with a better way to store and index this stuff, it's Google.
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we can just google for aliens now? Seti must be pissed.
Will this mean all future NASA projects will be in a near-permanent Beta release? Oh wait, nothing new there...
Testing is slated to begin in Q4 2005 by searching for intelligent life here on Earth.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Well, I hope the collaboration does not imply NASA is going to land their ships with the aid of Google's close-range moon maps. Last I heard, they had some 'holes' in their technology.
My other post is a First.
I for one, welcome our Google overlords...
PS when's lunch?
Search query: a l i e n s -> I'm Feeling Lucky
. csicop.org/si/8512/face-on-mars.jpg&imgrefurl=http ://www.csicop.org/si/8512/face-on-mars.html&h=200& w=200&sz=9&tbnid=wV2pf_vxAMoJ:&tbnh=99&tbnw=99&pre v=/images%3Fq%3Dface%2Bon%2Bmars%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D &oi=imagesr&start=2
*****searching
404 Not Found -> Back -> Search
*****searching
10 of 1000000000000000000 results found
Froogle results: Would you like to buy a new shuttle? Only $17,000,000.00!
Search results ranked in order:
Aliens found on Mars! -> *CLICK!*
404 Not Found -> Back -> Google Cache
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www
-> Back
New Search: Space Porn
*****searching
10 of 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 results found
Froogle: Would you like to buy a new space condom? $2!
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Let's face it... Google would make SETI a lot more interesting.
Well, you have gotta understand that Google and NASA work on entirely different types of data:
Google = Web pages/multi-media content that is hyperlinked
NASA = Large relational tables storing petabytes of data from sensors and telescopic readings...
The techniques for mining are different in both cases.. when they talk about "Bio/Nano" it refers to entirely new domain.. Its not as easy as plug-n-play with different domains. Agreed, Google has mastered the algorithms for ranking and extracting data from Web-pages but mining data out of relational streams of data is entirely a different ball game.