How To Find International Space Station On Google Maps

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 Folio's far-fetched thought to create a 360-degree map of the world and we recently celebrated x 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 applied science we use, the appearance of the planet — but the goal of Google Maps has remained the same: to assistance you navigate and discover new corners of the Earth…and now beyond.

On July xx, the 48th ceremony of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, Street View released its first zip-gravity collection — enabling anyone to explore the International Space Station (ISS) from the comfort of the Earth. For the first fourth dimension, yous can tour all xv modules and 2 visiting docking vehicles (SpaceX Dragon and Orbital Cygnus) of the ISS in 360 degrees. We're excited nearly the collection — our commencement to be acquired in a zero-gravity environs and the first collection with annotations, a feature previously just available for Google Arts & Culture museums. At present every bit you walk through the modules of the ISS in Google Maps you lot'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 shut collaboration betwixt Google, all major infinite agencies (NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, JAXA) and CASIS (Eye for the Advancement of Science in Infinite). We teamed upwardly with Thomas Pesquet, a European Infinite Agency astronaut, who used onboard camera equipment and a pair of bungee cords to complete the drove of all modules. Every bit the collection had to be done in the absenteeism of gravity with limited mounting hardware onboard, we needed to adjust our terrestrial method for holding the photographic camera while allowing it to be rotated around a fixed bespeak so that the effect of parallax artifacts from stitched images could exist minimized.

Street View Ops Atomic number 82 tests out the crossed bungee setup during the dry out-run at the Johnson Space Middle

To test out and validate viable concepts and to create crew procedures for the on-orbit performance, we conducted a dry out-run at the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the Johnson Infinite Heart. Using a pair of crossed bungee cords already bachelor onboard the ISS, we could define a signal in space around which the camera can exist rotated. In a weightless environment, the astronaut could just identify the camera next to the rotation indicate, and float around the camera while collecting images at the required camera angles.

The behind-the-scenes video provides a glimpse of the team'due south work during the dry-run and the kickoff 2 hours of the on-orbit imagery drove operation.

Navigating through space

Navigating inside the ISS and making sense of what'southward inside tin can be disruptive. 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 most the ISS, we introduced point-specific-annotations that provide 'up and down' navigation and more information near points of interest, such as how exercise machines work and why information technology'due south important for astronaut to practice in space.

Screenshot of an ISS prototype in Google Maps showing the ARED (Advanced Exercise Device) and its annotation

The ISS Street View imagery can be accessed from the Street View gallery, Google Earth Voyager, Google Arts & Civilisation, 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 lesser of the folio, and and so click on the ISS 'planet' for the imagery.

We promise that the ISS imagery volition inspire more Earthlings to explore this modern engineering marvel and get a glimpse of what it's similar to alive and piece of work in 1 of the near unique places in the world.