Outer Space View: Visit the International Space Station in Street View
By Alice Liu, Technical Program Manager, Google Street View
Street View started out as Larry Page’s far-fetched idea to create a 360-degree map of the world and we recently celebrated 10 years of beautiful imagery from around the world. Today, people can scale mountains, dive into the depths of the ocean, scout out ramen spots, and walk through museums in far corners of the world. Over the last decade, a lot has changed — the technology we use, the appearance of the planet — but the goal of Google Maps has remained the same: to help you navigate and discover new corners of the Earth…and now beyond.
On July 20, the 48th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, Street View released its first zero-gravity collection — enabling anyone to explore the International Space Station (ISS) from the comfort of the Earth. For the first time, you can tour all 15 modules and 2 visiting docking vehicles (SpaceX Dragon and Orbital Cygnus) of the ISS in 360 degrees. We’re excited about the collection — our first to be acquired in a zero-gravity environment and the first collection with annotations, a feature previously only available for Google Arts & Culture museums. Now as you walk through the modules of the ISS in Google Maps you’ll see clear and useful annotations highlighting things like where the astronauts work out to stay physically fit, what kind of food they eat, and where they do scientific experiments.
Adapting Street View methods for zero-gravity collection
It is the culmination of a year-long effort that involved close collaboration between Google, all major space agencies (NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, JAXA) and CASIS (Center for the Advancement of Science in Space). We teamed up with Thomas Pesquet, a European Space Agency astronaut, who used onboard camera equipment and a pair of bungee cords to complete the collection of all modules. As the collection had to be done in the absence of gravity with limited mounting hardware onboard, we needed to adapt our terrestrial method for holding the camera while allowing it to be rotated around a fixed point so that the effect of parallax artifacts from stitched images could be minimized.
To test out and validate viable concepts and to create crew procedures for the on-orbit operation, we conducted a dry-run at the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the Johnson Space Center. Using a pair of crossed bungee cords already available onboard the ISS, we could define a point in space around which the camera can be rotated. In a weightless environment, the astronaut could simply place the camera next to the rotation point, and float around the camera while collecting images at the required camera angles.
Navigating through space
Navigating inside the ISS and making sense of what’s inside can be confusing. It is a large 3-dimensional structure consisting of many interconnected modules that host both infrastructure to sustain life and instruments to enable scientific experiments conducted in space. To enhance people’s experiences exploring and learning about the ISS, we introduced point-specific-annotations that provide ‘up and down’ navigation and more information about points of interest, such as how exercise machines work and why it’s important for astronaut to exercise in space.
The ISS Street View imagery can be accessed from the Street View gallery, Google Earth Voyager, Google Arts & Culture, the Google Expeditions app, and the Google Daydream app. The imagery set can also be accessed from desktop via the Planets Runway. To access this special runway from maps.google.com, activate the satellite view, zoom out all the way until a Planets runway appears at the bottom of the page, and then click on the ISS ‘planet’ for the imagery.
We hope that the ISS imagery will inspire more Earthlings to explore this modern engineering marvel and get a glimpse of what it’s like to live and work in one of the most unique places in the world.
