On February 2nd, Google is presenting a new version of Google Earth at the California Academy of Sciences, an aquarium, planetarium and natural history museum in San Francisco. This is the perfect location for them to unveil what I suspect will be what people are calling “Google Ocean”.

If you look at maps in Google Maps, or Google Earth, you can see that they have already updated imagery for the ocean floor — but it could be so much better.

Many suspect that we could be days away from seeing a 3D ocean view — the ability to fly across the ocean floor is something that researchers would absolutely love to be able to do.

It’s very unlikely that we’re going to see much high resolution imagery (but I would be surprised if there was none), because that information simply does not exist yet, and it’s difficult and expensive to obtain. It would take 100 ships a whole year to get the type of information needed.

“We hope that one of the outcomes of Google Ocean will be an understanding of how much remains to be explored,” said Miller of Scripps. “We know far more about the surface of Mars from a few weeks of radar surveying in orbit than we know of the bottom of the ocean after two centuries.” — CNET

Google Earth is becoming an excellent tool for researchers to collaborate on anything from space to the depths of our oceans.

The highest resolution commercial Earth imaging satellite to date, the GeoEye-1, was launched over the weekend on a Delta-II rocket that carried the Google logo alongside the GeoEye logo on its side. The satellite was built as part of the U.S. National Geospatial Agency’s NextView program under which the agency shared the costs of engineering, construction and launch of new generation satellites to support the commercial satellite imaging industry. For the GeoEye-1 satellite the agency funded about US$237 million of the total $502 million price tag. The agency has also committed to buying imaging data from the satellite for at least the first year and a half of operations.

Google will also be buying images taken by the satellite to supplement those it already uses in its Google Earth and Google Maps services. GeoEye-1, which was launched at 11:51 a.m. Saturday morning, is capable of shooting 41-centimeter black and white images and 1.65 meter color images. The measurements refer to the size of the smallest thing that it can see from its orbit 681 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. U.S. regulations mean the highest resolution images available to commercial customers will be at 50cm, but while not the best the satellite can offer, is still double that of the current best-resolution image available from GeoEye’s Ikonos satellite.

Source: PC World