Last Christmas Eve: NORAD’s Santa tracker

norad santa tracker 2009

Last Christmas Eve, Jeff Martin found himself forced to explain to a Canadian general why, when Santa Claus passed through Toronto that night, Google Maps had placed the city in the United States.

Martin, then a senior marketing manager in Google’s Geo group, was part of a huge team of people involved in the joint U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command’s annual NORAD Santa tracker program, a long-running effort to provide children the world over a live view of Santa’s progress as he and his reindeer deliver Christmas presents.

In 2007, Google signed onto the project as a technology partner, and since then, has been incorporating NORAD’s data on Santa’s whereabouts into special 2D Google Maps and 3D Google Earth representations.

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