Google: NASA should collaborate with public
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The U.S. space program should look to collaboration and open systems to drive the next wave of human exploration and innovation, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said Thursday.&quot;Assume that you don&#39;t have all the answers,&quot; Schmidt said during a speech celebrating the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration&#39;s (NASA) 50th anniversary. &quot;I can assure you that we don&#39;t.&quot;Schmidt used his speech in Washington, D.C., to promote the benefits of open architectures and collaboration. He talked about the importance of collaboration between organizations, such as the images from NASA and private satellite providers Google has used to create Google Earth, but also of the benefit to NASA and other government agencies of seeking ideas from the public.It&#39;s amazing what applications people find for Google Earth, Schmidt said. Archeologists are using the desktop maps to find ancient Celtic settlements, he said.&quot;We don&#39;t anticipate all this,&quot; he said. &quot;We just put the information out there, and people use it.&quot;Schmidt praised programs such as NASA&#39;s Centennial Challenge, which awards cash prizes to inventors that come up with solutions to the agency&#39;s needs. Last year, NASA awarded $200,000 to Peter Horner, an unemployed engineer from Maine, who created a new space glove using a common rubber glove.Google has sponsored the X Prize Foundation, an organization that runs similar competitions, with an award of up to $30 million for a group that can design and launch a lunar lander with a robotic explorer on board. In many cases, the teams competing for the prize in these types of competitions spend more than the total prize money, but the public awards spur competition, Schmidt said.&quot;Why would we do this?&quot; Schmidt said. &quot;Because it&#39;s fun.&quot;Government agencies can&#39;t have a totally open development model, Schmidt said. NASA can&#39;t completely adopt the Google &quot;shift and iterate&quot; model of launching a lot of projects, knowing many of them will fail, because the agency has launch targets it has to meet, he saidBut NASA can learn from open software development and projects&#160;such as&#160;Linux and&#160;MySQL, where collaboration is necessary. And the agency can learn about the value of flexibility from companies such as Google, he said.&quot;The best way to be lucky is to create more luck,&quot; he said. &quot;And the best way to create more luck is to create more at-bats.&quot;One audience member asked Schmidt where the next wave of scientific advances would come. Schmidt said the IT sector has made tremendous strides in the last 30 years. If storage advances continue at their current pace, an iPod-like device will be able to hold 85 years of video by the year 2019, he said.&quot;You couldn&#39;t watch it all,&quot; he said. &quot;You&#39;d be dead.&quot;But the next breakthroughs should come in the areas of biology and biotechnology, Schmidt predicted. The biotech industry still needs more computing power for many breakthroughs to occur, he said.
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Google Inc. is best known for finding information online, but sometimes the Internet search leader also works behind the scenes to look for missing people like renowned aviator Steve Fossett.
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Google has launched a program to help nonprofits use Google Earth to raise awareness of their missions and better demonstrate what they do
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NASA expects to have  twice as much room as it needs for its research on the  International Space Station and is looking for U.S. partners to  share the novel piece of real estate, authorities said on  Monday.
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Google Inc., a company synonymous with searching the Internet, hopes to define far more of the world's computing experience with a helping hand from schoolchildren.
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SPACE.com / Top officials from NASA and China are meeting this week to gauge the prospects for potential partnerships in future space endeavors.
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Google and NASA will work together to make space information, as well as weather on Earth, available on the Internet, NASA said. Weather visualization and forecasting and tracking of the international space station are among the projects under discussion.
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Combining the assets of NASA and the EPA with NOAA's weather information is at the heart of a new NASA project called IDEA:  Infusing Satellite Data into Environmental Air Quality Applications. IDEA will improve forecasters' ability to track regional pollution and make air quality forecasts.
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WASHINGTON, Feb. 1  /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On Wednesday, NASA agreed to cooperate with PlanetSpace Inc. of Chicago and Transformational Space Corp.
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NASA Ames Research Center has entered into a Space Act agreement with Google, which will combine the technical expertise of the search engine giant with the space science expertise of NASA, to enable NASA's space exploration work to become accessible to everyone.
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China and 15 other countries joined NASA officials this week to consider how they might cooperate with U.S. plans for human exploration of the moon and Mars.
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Trying to save the famed Hubble Space Telescope with a robot would cost $2 billion with just a 50-50 chance of success, an aerospace research group is advising NASA in the coming days.
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The White House on Wednesday told 15 federal agencies to better share scientific data about the Earth among themselves and with other nations.
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(InfoWorld) - GoogleÂ introduced a program on Tuesday to help nonprofit organizations use its Google Earth satellite mapping program to build Web-based applications that illustrate their mission and advocate their work. The program, called Google Earth Outreach, is a combination of resources that will help nonprofits use Google Earth, such as video tutorials for developers and online forums where nonprofits can connect, Director of Google Earth and Maps John Hanke said at an event at Google's New York office. Google also is making its Google Earth Pro edition available for free to nonprofits that fill out a grant application. The program is usually $400 per user, per year. Google is presenting case studies of the applications nonprofits have built using Google Earth on the Google Earth Outreach Web site. The program grew out of a group of Google employees' "20 percent" project, Hanke said. Google allows its employees to spend 20 percent of their time on projects they are personally interested in. After relief workers used Google Earth during Hurricane Katrina to locate stranded New Orleans residents, several employees wanted to use the product for humanitarian purposes, he said. "That opened our minds to something we never really considered -- that it might be something significantly meaningful in our product, not just [for] day-to-day utility and interesting and fun kind of things," Hanke said. Google had representatives from key nonprofits on hand Tuesday, physically and virtually, to promote the program. Most notably, famed wildlife advocate Jane Goodall appeared via video conference from London, where she explained how the Jane Goodall Institute's involvement with Google Earth Outreach is a far cry from how she used technology -- basically a pencil and a notebook -- when she first began her research living among chimpanzees in Africa in 1960. As part of Google Earth Outreach, the institute has a "geoblog" where users can zoom in and see the places in Africa that Goodall has written about in her books and track the progress and lives of the chimpanzees she has tagged in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. In this way, she said, people can feel as if they are more personally involved with the work she is doing and want to contribute to it. "It certainly is helping us hugely with our conservation efforts and also enabling us to involve a wider audience of people," she said. "People get really involved, really excited about this. It's like a soap opera for wild chimpanzees." Edward Wilson, president and CEO of Earthwatch, appeared in person at the event. Earthwatch, a scientific research organization for the preservation of a suitable environment for the earth, also is participating in the Google Earth Outreach program. Wilson said that the satellite mapping in Google Earth "shrinks the planet" so issues like the ones his organization are trying to spread awareness about become more accessible. Scientists can use Google Earth to zoom in and share information across the globe, so, for instance, "a turtle researcher in Costa Rica can share information with a turtle researcher in Malaysia," he said. Still, Wilson said, the key for a nonprofit is not just that its workers can find and share information, but that they can illustrate their mission to as many people as possible so they will get involved at a local level in global issues. That's why Google Earth Outreach is a useful tool for them. "Unless we get key stakeholders involved, it's not going to move the dial," he said. During a question-and-answer session, one attendee brought up problems Google has faced with government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense and other commercial and public entities that are none too pleased with the idea of the average person having easy access to the world's satellite imagery. Indeed, the company's mission to collect and give people access to as much of the world's information as possible has always inspired security and privacy concerns. For nonprofits that have to consider private interests as well as the public good, global satellite mapping can be a thorny issue, said Matt Merrifield, geospatial technology director for the California region of The Nature Conservancy. His organization works to set aside land to be preserved for environmental and ecological reasons and often has to work with private landholders who "don't want to see their land on a public level," he said. However, Goodall thinks that to help spur interest in the global issues nonprofits such as hers are advocating, it's better to give people as much information as possible. And pairing that information with visual representations of the work being done adds a personal element that inspires people to get more involved than they normally might. "Right from the beginning, I wanted to share everything I found at Gombe, and I was criticized for writing popular books," Goodall said. "But if we want to save chimpanzees, forests, and other creatures around the planet, this is the way to do it. It's not just to reach into people's brains but into their hearts as well."
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Blog: With that purpose in mind, space agency plans to share info with private industry.
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The U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are joining forces to enhance astronomy.
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Google Inc. launched an initiative yesterday to help non profit groups use maps and satellite images to raise awareness, recruit volunteers, and encourage donations.