WHAT’S THE STORY?

GOOGLE Street View has taken off to new heights to deliver a user experience that is quite simply out of this world.

Most of us have explored our own locales and taken part in online tours of our family and friends’ neighbourhoods.

Now Street View allows us to explore the inside of the International Space Station (ISS) as it orbits 250 miles above planet Earth. Matthew Potter, Google’s technical operations lead for Street View, said the tech giant reached for the stars because Earth was no longer big enough.

“We have mapped all over the world and really wanted to see where we could go,” he said in the promotional video.

“Why not space?”

The company enlisted the help of astronauts to capture the 360-degree panoramas of the insides of all 15 of the ISS modules and stunning views of Earth below. Some of the images feature pop-up text annotations showing where the astronauts work out, what they eat, and where they conduct scientific experiments, as well as areas such as the Zarya Module, the Japanese Experiment Module (Kibo) and the Cupola, a small module for the observation of operations outside the ISS.

HOW DID THEY DO IT?

GIVEN that vehicle-mounted or backpack cameras were out of the question, Google enlisted the help of those on the ISS, who had to fit the activity – which took around four months to complete – around their other work.

One of them, Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut, used a plethora of digital SLR cameras on the ISS to shoot stills, which were stitched together to create the 360-degree imagery. “It will be a fantastic opportunity for everyone to fly with us and to experience the incredible feeling of being in space,” said Pesquet in the video.

“The sheer size of this space station is huge, it’s unbelievably big.”

In a blog post the astronaut said the process was far from easy, adding: “The [space station] has technical equipment on all surfaces, with lots of cables and a complicated layout with modules shooting off in all directions.

“And it’s a busy place, with six crew members carrying out research and maintenance activities 12 hours a day. There are a lot of obstacles up there.

“Oh, and there’s that whole zero gravity thing.”

It isn’t the first time such imagery has been captured beyond Earth. The ESA published its own interactive tour of the ISS in 2015. And last year Nasa used images from its Pathfinder mission to Mars to create clips for use in virtual reality headsets.

WHY DO IT THEN?

GOOGLE may not be able to make money out of it, but some experts have suggested it could help keep their mapping technology ahead of rivals such as Apple. But the company hopes to inspire the public to further explore the science and engineering involved in space exploration – it should give viewers an improved sense of freedom and movement and a greater choice of viewpoints than was previously possible.

Its project manager Alice Lui said: “Every [ISS] component had to be flown on a space shuttle or rocket and constructed and connected in space, and it had to be done with such precision that it formed a hermetic environment to support life. That is an engineering marvel that people should care about and know about.”

And creating the out-of-this-world Street View had posed unique challenges. Projects such as capturing underwater views of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the sights from Peru’s Machu Picchu citadel involved the transportation of specialist camera equipment to the locations.

But the cost and processes involved this time were impractical, as was sending its own staff to take the pictures.

“Typically, to stitch panoramic images we take a camera and mount it on a fixed mount and rotate it around,” said Liu. “In space there were no tripods, so we ended up using a really simple set-up: a pair of bungee cords strapped in the module in a criss-cross fashion, so that the crossing point defined the centre of where the camera needed to be. The astronauts had to take the pictures at the defined angles and float around the camera to complete the set of images.”

IS IT WORTH ALL THE WORK?

WE think so, but you can judge for yourself here https://www.google.com/streetview/#international-space-station/cupola-observational-module Whatever your view, this is a fantastic technical feat, and more than a little fun, which offers unparalleled views of what has been home to astronauts for the past 16 years.