Google Street View has been widely popular as their library has been expanding very fast and people could take a tour of notable places and enjoy the view from the comfort of home. Now, Google has gone further as ESA and Goole have partnered to provide a tour of International Space Station to the Google Maps users.
The new imagery lets you walk through all the different modules via Google Street View. Not only this, Google also provides explanations and guides for some equipment. users can move from one module to another and also, Google may be thinking of expanding it further.
Also, at the time when the imagery was collected for this project, one of Space X’s Dragon vehicles was parked at the ISS. So, you can also get some idea about how cargo gets delivered to the International Space Station.
Thomas Pesquet, Astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA) said, “I am very enthusiastic about bringing street view aboard ISS. It will be a fantastic opportunity for everyone to experience the incredible feeling of being in space. The six months that we spent on the ISS, it was difficult to find the words or take a picture that accurately describes the feeling of being in space. Working with Google on the mission has made me think about my own world a little differently, and I hope that the ISS on Google Maps Street View changes viewer’s perspective of the world too.”
The Google Street View team worked with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to design a gravity-free method of collecting the imagery using DSLR cameras and equipment that are already present on the ISS. The still photos were then collected from the ISS were sent down to Earth, where they were stitched together to create panoramic 360-degree imagery of the ISS.
Wanna take a tour right now? You can do it by clicking here.
