Google, Lost in Space?
Google and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have joined forces, an unlikely alliance you would think, unless of course Google has already begun preparations for dominating other planets. While one rules the search space, the other governs space exploration. While one sustains an $87 billion market cap, the other commands a $16 billion annual budget for manning space probes and missions. While one has a stock that trades in the stratosphere, the other…well, you get my drift. Mid-last week, Google and NASA in a joint press conference, announced that they had signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), outlining plans for cooperation on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, improved analysis of engineering problems, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry.
Purportedly, the deal between the two parties is the culmination of years of talks of mutual interest. Essential to their upcoming plans, the two neighboring organizations, envision the construction of a million-square facility within NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley that would serve as a world-class, educational and R&D campus. In the words of Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, the Ames campus would be a “natural physical extension” of Google’s Mountain View headquarters, complete with new laboratories, offices, classrooms, housing, auditoriums, museums, a training and conference center, open space, as well as parking and limited retail facilities. The new campus is expected to serve as a breeding ground for new ideas and concepts, allowing Google and NASA engineers to collaborate on projects and share research ideas.
Officials at Google and NASA believe the partnership to be a logical fit. NASA, in its long and rich history, has amassed immense amounts of information from its various space programs. Till this day, the space agency receives as much as a terabyte of data per day from its space vehicles. What better company is there than Google to organize this vast sea of data, while also making it available to the public? Furthermore, NASA no longer maintains as large a share of the U.S. budget as it once did. Partnerships with technology companies like Google will become progressively more vital to NASA if it is to fulfill its future goals, such as the exploration of Mars.
Google, meanwhile, will gain access to NASA’s work in developing huge parallel supercomputers, including the scientists who manage the world’s third most powerful supercomputer, the 10,000-processor machine called Project Columbia, built by Silicon Graphics utilizing Intel’s Itanium 2 processors. While direct access to the supercomputer may not be feasible, Google engineers will be able to discuss supercomputing design with NASA engineers. The possibilities are limitless. This alone, would allow Google to make further inroads with its 3-D maps. While the search engine giant already employs satellite imagery in its Google Maps service and for its Google Earh software, imagine being able to view imagery with information about temperatures or crop patterns. Moreover, with Google gaining access to NASA’s space data and imagery, a Google Mars or Google Moon may soon become a reality.
While the finer details of the alliance’s implementation have been kept to a minimum, Schmidt and Hubbard elaborated on the elemental, mutual benefits that will flow from the announced partnership. According to Schmidt, “Google and NASA share a common desire-to bring a universe of information to people around the world. Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your fingertips whenever you want it. That’s just one small example of how this collaboration could help broaden technology’s role in making the world a better place.” While Hubbard believes the planned partnership presents a vast array of potential benefits to the space program, he states, “The real winner will be the American public.”
Sources:
http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/2005/09/29/
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