Google Earth has just added an amazing new location for its Google Street View feature.
In addition to your favorite spots on the globe, you can now use the app to explore the International Space Station (ISS) from your laptop.
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Over 250 people from 20 countries have visited the International Space Station since its launch in 1998.
Most of the ‘guests’ were astronauts but, on a few occasions, space tourists have been allowed in, too.
And now, for the first time in Google Earth’s history, anyone with an internet connection will be able to use the app to venture beyond planet Earth and explore the International Space Station remotely.
In addition to these high-res images, Google also provides handy notes detailing things astronauts can do aboard the station, the sort of food they eat (and how), and what sort of experiments they conduct on the ISS.
The 360-degree imagery allows you to explore the 15 connected modules that comprise the ISS.
Thomas Pesquet, the European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut that helped Google collect the images, said dealing with zero gravity was the probably the trickiest part.
“There are a lot of obstacles up there, and we had limited time to capture the imagery, so we had to be confident that our approach would work,” Pesquet said.
“Oh, and there’s that whole zero gravity thing,” he added.
Well, based on what we can see from the images, it worked, didn’t it?
Up until now, we’d only been able to explore the ISS using bad pictures posted to the internet or screenshots from live TV interviews with the personnel.
Mind you, this is different, this is the real deal – it’s as close as we’re going to get to feeling like we’re ‘inside’ the space station.
