NASA - NASA and Google to Bring Space Exploration Down to Earth:
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - NASA Ames Research Center and Google have signed a Space Act Agreement that formally establishes a relationship to work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging 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 visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future.
NASAとGoogleがタッグを組むのは初めてではない。Google Marsの時とかあったしね。しかし今回は包括的であると同時に、iEarthと呼ばれるソフトがGoogle Earthと共に来年4月にリリースされるらしいのがポイント。書かれている内容からすると、これはリアルタイム版Google Earthっぽい。スポットを選ぶとあるので、丸ごとリアルな地球がグルグル回るわけではないにしろ、これはすごいことだ。
NASA overwhelmed by climate data - earth - 15 December 2006 - New Scientist Environment:
Called iEarth, the NASA software scours EOS databanks for information and converts it into a file that can be viewed via Google Earth. Choosing a spot on the planet's surface will prompt iEarth to display ground-based measurements for that location, as well as data relating to the atmosphere and space above it.
