Thursday, September 13, 2007

New Google Moon

Google has revamped their Google Moon maps site. It’s not loading too well here, but maybe you’re more lucky. You can now see little astronaut icons with info bubbles for specific moonlanding sites. Also, as Pau in the forum notes, the “cheese surface” easter egg (it was showing for the highest moon zoom level) has been removed. In its place, Google says they’ve added “Street View-style panoramas of the moon’s surface, taken by the Apollo astronauts.”

In other space news, Google is sponsoring the Lunar X-Prize with $30 million to push private moon landings (update: ... of a robot, that is), they say, and according to several other sources, is using a NASA-owned runway to land their private jet nowadays. (Google by and large is pretty space-obsessed: they also have a SpaceShipOne replica hanging in the stairwell of Googleplex building 43, celebrating the first privately funded human spaceflight.)

[Thanks Pau, Manoj Nahar and Alek!]

New Google Moon by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5+16)

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