How do you get 120 terabytes of data -- the equivalent of 123,000 iPod shuffles (roughly 30 million songs) -- from A to B? For the most part, the old-fashioned way: via a sneakernet. It's not glamorous, but Google engineers hope to at least end the arduous process of transferring massive quantities of data -- which can literally take weeks to upload onto the internet -- with something affectionately called "FedExNet" by the scientists who use it.

Chris DiBona, the open-source program manager at Google, just returned late last week from Washington, D.C., where he met with Hubble researchers at the Space telescope Science Institute to set the stage for what will be the largest data transfer for the project ever: The near totality of all the astronomical data and images that Hubble has ever collected -- about 120 terabytes.

"Right now, we're just acting as a conduit," DiBona says. "We make a copy of it, and then we can use the hard drives for something else. They'll get banged around a little bit too much (to store the data directly on the drives). They're not intended to be a long-term storage medium -- they're like envelopes to us."