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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.
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
They really are trying to search everything, aren't they?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"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
The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence will be replaced by Google for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence.
Google's stock offering has been very carefully structured to give Larry and Sergei a lot more control[1] than the ordinary shareholding public (and besides, Google is still relatively closely held - the main shareholders of Google are its investors and they trust the founders+Eric Schmidt implicitly). In fact, the non-founding shareholders (mostly Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia) likely know that Google's 'goofiness' makes for good press and share price, and as long as the party continues they're unlikely to rock the boat.
[1] WaPo: After IPO, Google Founders Plan to Remain in Control
Go somewhere random
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.
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]
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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