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.

Re:Moffett

[josephtd]

Yea, well there is now a surplus of of office space around the Moffett Field area. My office is over on Shoreline and there are For Lease signs everywhere.

Re:Google never should have went public

[bheer]

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 [washingtonpost.com]

NASA has needed Google technology for a long time

[alispguru]

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 [noaa.gov]. 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.