Google has contributed funding to the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a NASA spacecraft (smallsat) in cooperation with MIT and the Harvard Smithsonian Center that could potentially be launched in 2012.

Google, the Internet search powerhouse that in recent years has expanded to include mapping of the stars as well as the surfaces of the moon and Mars and which has an ongoing collaboration with NASA's Ames Research Center, provided a small seed grant to fund development of the wide-field digital cameras needed for the satellite. Because of the huge amount of data that will be generated by the satellite, Google has an interest in working on the development of ways of sifting through that data to find useful information.

It's interesting that private companies seem to be increasingly funding large science projects.... (N.B., I've noticed this mostly in the physical sciences...)