World is not enough for Google

20th September 2007

Search engine giant Google has teamed up with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to improve the quality of moon images and maps.

Available on the Google Moon website, new images are complemented with examples from the Apollo missions and are overlaid with updated, higher-resolution lunar maps.

Lunar travel simulators and space geeks can examine detailed charts of different regions of the moon.

Director of strategic business development at Nasa's Ames Research Centre Chris Kemp said: "Nasa's objective is for Google Moon to become a more accurate and useful lunar mapping platform that will be a foundation for future web-based moon applications."

He added that it would enable scientists to access lunar data more easily.

Google and Nasa formed their working partnership under a Space Act Agreement, signed in December.

Meanwhile, the search engine that is branching out into all kinds of different areas, is planning to exploit the new popularity of "widgets", interactive design gadgets for web pages.

While almost all widgets are currently free, Google plans to use them to distribute advertising.