Google Maps Mars

[Tombstone]

Google Maps Mars

The Google Earth team has launched a new maps site — but this one has almost nothing to do with Earth. Google Mars maps the surface of the red planet. It was released today in commemoration of the birthday of Percival Lowell, the amateur astronomer who argued that Mars' topography exhibited signs of a past civilization who dug canals to husband the planet's water supplies.

Now you can judge for yourself by scrolling around on the planet's surface in your browser. There are actually three sets of map data, as explained in today's post on the Official Google blog:

An elevation map shows color-coded peaks and valleys, a visible-imagery map shows what your eyes would actually see, and an infrared-imagery map shows the detail your eyes would miss.

No sign yet of Edgar Rice Burrough's princesses and beasties or Bradbury's abandoned cities. But we're looking.

Google's map of Mars was created using data from Arizona State University's Mars Education Program and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Space Geodesy Laboratory. The GSFC data is the product of the extremely successful Mars Global Surveyor mission, which placed a spacecraft in orbit 400 kilometers above the Martian surface to visually map the planet. It even managed to snap a few photos of the Mars rover driving around.

Mars is the third body in the solar system to be mapped by the Google team. In addition to Google Earth, there's also Google Moon (try zooming all the way in on the Apollo landing sites). Which planet will they map next?

http://www.google.com/mars/

http://moon.google.com/

[sunny104]

WOW! That is cool!

[spot]

I note from today's news that Nasa might send the Mars rover Opportunity into a crater on the Red Planet with no escape route. Perhaps there's a job for Donald Rumsfeld on the space program, he has more experience of that scenario than anyone else alive.

[Bill Sikes]

spot;454379 wrote: I note from today's news that Nasa might send the Mars rover Opportunity into a crater on the Red Planet with no escape route. Perhaps there's a job for Donald Rumsfeld on the space program, he has more experience of that scenario than anyone else alive.


Oooh! You *bitch*! (etc).

[spot]

This is on today's BBC website too. It's not a photo to hang in the bathroom.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6135450.stm

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/v ... ideoID=136 even has a video of it moving.

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