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A recent discussion in the SEO Philippines Yahoogroups was about a meet-up between NASA and Google. The discussion started when someone in the group asked what could be the reason behind NASA and Google’s meeting?

There were hilarious suggestions as well as serious ones. Now I think, we can settle the issue with this one true fact.

Google has joined the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project, which intends to complete the world’s largest survey telescope by 2013. Google will work with nineteen universities and national labs that are designing and building the telescope.

A computer generated view of the Large Scale Synoptic Survey Telescope Site

The proposed telescope itself will be a ground-based 8.4 meter, 10-square-degree field instrument capable of providing digital imaging across the entire sky. In an endless series of ten-second exposures, the LSST will cover the available sky every three nights over a period of ten years. The telescope will be built atop Cerro Pachón in Chile.

Google and the LSST project share some important characteristics; both groups seek to organize massive quantities of data and then share it in the most useful possible form. Every night that the LSST operates, it will store over thirty terabytes (30,000 gigabytes) of data. Google will provide assistance in the following areas:

1. organizing the flow of large parallel data streams
2. processing and analyzing the data streams in a continuous 24/7, fault-tolerant manner
3. providing a dynamic view of the night sky for the lay public, as well as for specialists.

Google’s VP of Engineering, William Coughran, remarked that “Google’s mission is to take the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The data from LSST will be an important part of the world’s information, and by being involved in the project we hope to make it easier for that data to become accessible and useful.”

This project is not Google’s first step into the sky. Google has already collaborated with NASA in its iEarth program.

Every day, NASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS) transmits terabytes of data back to ground stations. The Google Earth application already provides easy access to worldwide maps. iEarth is an application that superimposes this data on top of 3D maps provided by Google Earth.

Picking a spot on the Earth will prompt the application to look through EOS and convert that data into a file viewable from Google Earth.

Google’s iEarth application and its collaboration with the LSST project (iUniverse?) have a remarkable precursor in science fiction. In Neal Stephenson’s excellent 1992 novel Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist is given an amazing service - ordinarily available only to the wealthy - for free.

Read more about Google/NASA iEarth. Don’t forget their obsession with the “inner space” of humanity’s imagination; take a look at Encyclopedia Googlactica - Google To Put All Human Knowledge Online. Learn more about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope at LSST.org.

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