NASA pimps Google Mars

Users of the Martian part of Google Earth will be delighted to hear that it has received enhancements. The new virtual-Mars features include historical maps of the red planet, and up-to-date imagery from spacecraft in orbit above it. The latest updates were put together in cooperation with NASA's Ames research centre. The …

[Tim Spence]

Historical maps?

When I were a lad, this was all Martian dunes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are the canals?

And where's the bookmark for amanfrommars' home?

[Tom Paine]

Other "live" data from planetary spacecraft

Or alternatively...

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/opportunity/ and

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/spirit/

gets the raw images from MER via JPL pretty much as they arrive on Earth. A bit quicker than Google's pipeline, I think? Data from Cassini at Saturn (about to start a fast twin-flyby series of Titan encounters), the utterly awesome 25cm-resolution HiRISE camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the three (? I think it is, now) lunar orbiters, including Kaguya with it's Hi Def video output,... et cetera, et cetera. There are also several really good fora where people build amazing image products from the raws - 3D anaglyphs, panoramas, pulling out detail too faint to have been seen in Voyager data at the time, writing stonking software like the Midnight Mars Browser, theorising the cryogeology of Titan from radar ,... oops, I got started didn't I :)

[Wize]

Shame you need the download

I prefer not to install anything from Google on my PC. If I use their maps its the web based ones, which for now are just earth.

Mines the one with the anonimised google cookie in the pocket.

[Cameron Colley]

How long before...

... AMFM complains that the crater-view cameras are violating his right to privacy?

[John Bayly]

It'll be interesting to see ...

the progress of Martian urban development in the last 30 years.

[Charlie van Becelaere]

Does this mean we can

catch Dejah Thoris sunbathing?

[David Given]

@ Tom Paine

...speaking of HiRise, which as you say is utterly awesome, they managed to get a picture of Deimos with it, which is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

That must have been a fairly impressive bit of manouvering to get the MRO's camera pointed in the right direction at the right time; from orbit, Deimos' motion across the sky must be pretty rapid...

@ Van Becelaere: you are aware, aren't you, that Dejah Thoris is actually some kind of egg-laying marsupial and not a human at all?