Google Moon

Image above: Artist’s rendition of spaceship Orion orbiting the moon with disc-shaped solar arrays tracking the sun to generate electricity.

Image Credit: Lockheed Martin Corp.

Mission Control Houston…requesting permission to land Orion…

Orion…please stand by…checking coordinates on Google Moon…

Roger…Houston!

Sound like science fiction? Maybe not! NASA is making preparations right now to send a new generation of human space explorers to the moon and beyond in the next decade.

Working with NASA to lay a foundation for future web-based moon applications is…

Google!

Here’s this week’s announcement from the Johnson Space Center in Houston:

New higher-resolution lunar imagery and maps that include NASA multimedia content now are available on the Google Moon Web site.

Updates include new content from the Apollo missions, including dozens of embedded panoramic images, links to audio clips and videos, and descriptions of the astronauts’ activities during the missions. The new content is overlaid on updated, higher-resolution lunar maps. Also added are detailed charts of different regions of the moon suitable for use by anyone simulating a lunar mission.

Google Moon’s visible imagery and topography are aligned with the recently updated lunar coordinate system and can be used for scientifically accurate mission planning and data analysis. The new site is designed to be user-friendly and encourage the exchange of data and ideas among scientists and amateur astronomers.

This announcement closely follows the release of new NASA content in Google Earth, including photographs taken by NASA astronauts and imagery from NASA’s Earth observing satellite sensors, such as the Sea-viewing Wide Field of View Sensor, Landsat and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer.

Astronaut photography was developed in collaboration with the Crew Earth Observations team, part of the Image Science and Analysis Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston. Satellite imagery of Earth was developed in partnership with the Earth Observatory team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The alliance was accomplished under a Space Act Agreement signed in December 2006 by Google and NASA’s Ames Research Center. Google is headquartered near Ames in northern California’s Silicon Valley.

There’s an expectation that runs throughout the grades and strands in the Pan Canadian Science Curriculum - “identify and use a variety of sources and technologies to gather pertinent information.” That’s been a tough one to accomplish. There have been times in my teaching career when I have really scrambled to come up with any appropriate resources for my students to use, let alone a variety. Now it seems like every day a new application, tool or information source comes along to help teachers and students make sense from the vast amount of information that’s available. Got to love it!

For more information about Google Moon see: www.google.com/moon/about.html

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