If you ever wanted to look inside the International Space Station (ISS), much like a street in your city, Google has found a solution for you.
Now you can see the insides of the ISS through Google Street View. Get ready for an exciting virtual tour of the spaceship.
Google Street View will provide the view of the innards of the space station.
You can now experience (virtually, at least) what the NASA astronauts see when they are in space, and all of that sitting in the comfort of your home, according to India Times.
The Street View provides a 360-degree view of the research laboratory, lab module, cargo block, docking vehicles among other spaces inside the ISS.
What’s more – the images are annotated with bits of information about the technical stuff, making it easier for a layman to understand the visuals.
Usually, Google has a white van that mounts the camera on its top which takes the pictures of the street view. This method was not viable to click pictures in space without gravity. European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet in his blog explained,
“Because of the particular constraints of living and working in space, it wasn’t possible to collect Street View using Google’s usual methods. Instead, the Street View team worked with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama to design a gravity-free method of collecting the imagery using DSLR cameras and equipment already on the ISS. Then I collected still photos in space, that were sent down to Earth where they were stitched together to create panoramic 360-degree imagery of the ISS.”
Pesquet in a Google Maps video said, “I wish people could see it with their own eyes so in future so that’s why we hope to make it more accessible.” Matthew Potter of Google Street View said that if the company has mapped almost the whole world, why not space. He said that that’s why they have tried to bring Street View to the space station.
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