Google and NASA have a healthy collaborative relationship that they have mentioned before. In their previous announcement, they mentioned that they will “work together on a variety of challenging technical problems ranging from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces.” These are fairly technically-advanced projects, and sounds like things that will make the backend gears work, but the Google-NASA relationship may bring out other things that will appeal directly to the ordinary netizens. Google Moon could be one of these.

Google Moon has existed even before the collaboration between the two organizations was announced, but the recent update to this specialized Google product contains a plethora of imagery that one may very well think that this is a result of the said collaboration.

Apollo Layer
So what’s new with Google Moon? For starters, there’s the Apollo View, one of the four moon views (Charts, Apollo, Visible and Elevation) that you can toggle to view different data visualizations about the Moon. The Apollo view shows the six Apollo program of NASA, which can be seen as 6 place-markers or as thumbnails at the bottom of the moon map.

Clicking on one of the markers (or thumbnails) will give more information about that particular Apollo mission, and you can zoom in to see more placemarks and information regarding that particular mission. The Apollo view is a great way to learn more about the different Apollo Missions of NASA.

Moon Charts Layer
The Charts layer is a collection of geological and topographic charts of various regions of the moon. These charts are beautifully imposed on top of corresponding areas of the moon.

You can switch between different chart types and quickly chose a particular region by making use of a nifty navigator that appears at the bottom right area of Google Moon.

Visible Layer
This is what makes up the default view of Google Moon, and this is a black-and-white version of what you would see if you were in orbit around the moon. Images were taken by the Clementine Mission.

Elevation
This lunar terrain map shows an airbrushed shaded relief map of the moon, color-coding the different areas of the moon by elevation. The color key found at the lower left can be used to estimate the elevations. Turning this layer on will give you a good feel on the different elevations of the terrain in the moon.