Google Street View Explores the Space Station
With one small click, you can now take that giant leap for mankind.
Google announced on Thursday that its Street View mapping tool now allows users to explore the International Space Station. The new feature provides panoramic, 360-degree views of the areas where astronauts live and work aboard the station.
Viewers can click through the 15 sections of the space station, as well as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, and select dots overlaid on top of objects to access and read more information.
The ISS is staffed by rotating international crew members and operates as a research laboratory for biology, life science, materials science and physics experiments. It orbits about 250 miles above Earth, and people have been living and working on the station for more than a decade.
Google developers worked with NASA to develop a “gravity-free method” to obtain the images.
Thomas Pesquet, a French astronaut with the European Space Agency, collected photographs and sent them back to Earth to be stitched together for the sweeping views. Pesquet spent six months aboard the station as a flight engineer, and returned to Earth in June.
Pesquet said in a post on Google’s blog that it was a challenge to get imagery that “accurately describes the feeling of being in space,” but that he wanted to give people the opportunity to tour the station and share the life-changing view.
“Looking at Earth from above made me think about my own world a little differently, and I hope that the ISS on Street View changes your view of the world too,” he said.
source:-https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-07-21/google-street-view-goes-inside-the-international-space-station
