Curiosity's discovery at its landing site in the equatorial Gale Crater provides the first real ground truth for those observations.
Since 2008, the firm's Ground Truth project has mashed together licensed data with information gathered by its own fleet of Street View cars and bicycles.
Beyond Ground Truth, Google also aims to improve its service by mapping the interiors of more buildings - the current emphasis is on transport hubs, shopping centres, museums and business that pay for an approved photographer to visit them.
The technology processes remote-sensing data, including data from the LANDSAT and RADAR satellites, in combination with ground truth data provided by a ground penetrating radar and other information drawn from geological, hydrogeological, geographical, hydrological and climate data and, when dealing with deep aquifers, seismological data.
The Mountain View, California has also driven more than 5 million unique miles as part of its five-year quest (called project Ground Truth) to build more accurate maps from its own raw data rather than licensing map content from others, said Brian McClendon, head of Google maps.
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Far from being the Pentagon Papers redux, the larger truth is how closely the ground-eye view in these documents reinforces what U.S. officials were long saying: that the war wasn't going well, the Taliban were making gains, and a new and invigorated strategy was needed to combat them.
Now the hard truth is that for decades we've been losing ground.
Indeed we need truth tellers and people who are willing to hold their ground but pessimism in a leader is ill suited.
Actually, the truth is that 4, 000 tonnes or so of uranium in the ground is a trivial amount.
In truth, Obama was a moderate young technocrat, whose first instinct was to seek the middle ground.
What I worry about with the president is that he's not acknowledging what's on the ground, that he's not acknowledging the realities in North Korea, he's not acknowledging the truth of the science of stem-cell research or of global warming and other issues.
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