YouTube Space Lab

Google have partnered with NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch a new YouTube channel called Space Lab.

The channel is running a competition for 14-18 years old to come up with a science experiment, which could be streamed live on YouTube from the International Space Station.

Space Lab also includes an ever growing playlist of the most inspiring space videos from across YouTube and a real-time Google Map showing the position of the International Space Station above the Earth.

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What the Space Station Astronauts See

Current Position of the ISS

The opportunity for space tourism is probably still a little way off for most of us. Whilst we all wait for Richard Branson to make space travel a lot more affordable we will have to make do with this Google Map showing the current location of the International Space Station on Google Maps.

The map shows the current view from the ISS looking down at the Earth. So you can fire up this map and pretend that you are a space station astronaut watching the Earth spin beautifully beneath you.



If your imagination needs a little more help then you should also check out NASA Astronaut Ron Garan's photo stream on Twitpic. Garan is currently posting photos from the space shuttle Endeavour and the International Space Station.


Hat-tip: @MPegg and @Renalid

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This Google Maps mashup is out of this world!

Keir Clarke has developed Star Viewer using the new 'sky' option in the Google Maps API:

With Star Viewer you can watch a number of astronomical videos embedded on a map of the night sky. A number of the videos are from the Hubblecast series produced by the European Space Agency. The Hubblecasts feature news and images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In addition to the videos the map placemarks give way to a number of other amazing images from Google's huge tileset of merged telescope images and that are also viewable in Google Sky!

Related:

• Maps from another world (Google Lat Long Blog)- Read about how to use the Maps API to create your own web-based mashups of the night sky, Mars and the Moon!
• Google Moon
• Google Mars
• The World at Night
• Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter

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