Google has teamed up with the US space agency NASA to do space age research at a sprawling new campus at a former military air base in Silicon Valley, officials announced.
Google will build a one million-square-foot (92,903-square-meter) complex of offices
and worker housing in the NASA Research Park at Moffett Field and join forces with
National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists, according to Google.
"Our planned partnership presents an enormous range of potential benefits to the
space program," said NASA Ames Center director Scott Hubbard.
Researchers will collaborate in areas including new materials, "bio-info-nano
convergence, supercomputing, data mining, and bringing entrepreneurs into the space
program," Hubbard said.
"Google and NASA share a common desire to bring a universe of information to people
around the world," said Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt.
"Imagine having a wide selection of images from the Apollo space mission at your
fingertips whenever you want it."
Google, deemed the top search engine on the Internet, will keep its current
"Googleplex" headquarters a few minutes drive from the NASA Ames facility on a former
Navy air base in the heart of Silicon Valley, according to the company.
The collaboration between NASA and Google will "couple some of the Earth's most
powerful technology resources," officials from both operations said in a written
release.
A "memorandum of understanding" signed by Google and NASA outlines areas of
cooperation including large-scale data management and "massively distributed
computing."