google Mars!

[janoskiss]

Check out today's google logo and what it links to: http://www.google.com/mars

Now where is google Moon? :confuse3:

[iceman]

Nice one!

I also recently found this hi-res image of Mars - I believe it's stitched together from shots taken by one of the spacecraft orbiting Mars.

http://solarviews.com/raw/mars/marscyl1l.jpg

Warning, it's over 5meg in total, but well worth it.

[Starkler]

What a great way to promote astronomy :thumbsup:

[ving]

now thats pretty sweet! :)
thanks!

[bird]

bookmarked :-)

[Starkler]

How long until the next opposition? :lol:

[bird]

The next decent opposition is about 2018 :-(

Bird

[iceman]

I'm sure there'll be newer, higher-res images of Mars by then :)

[evo]

Noticed google mars yesterday and was thrilled to find a new site to distract me from work!

one question though - if you zoom out as far as possible the image seems to cycle over. what is going on here? clearly not all of mars is patched together here. How much are we actually seeing?

regards, mike

[janoskiss]

You're seeing the whole thing I believe. It's longitude and latitude presented in Cartesian coordinate system, where the top and bottom of the map are the poles.

[sheeny]

The following is from the Nature NewsBlog. Written by Mark Peplow.

Google Mars (http://mars.google.com/)launched today to much fanfare. It provides a map of the entire surface of the red planet, using more than 17,000 photos taken by the thermal emission camera on the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which takes pictures in infra red and visible light, as well as the topographic maps made by MOLA, the Laser Altimeter on Mars Global Surveyor. Some key sites are imaged in much greater detail, such as the giant volcano Olympus Mons, the landing sites for the two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, and the grand canyon of Mars, Valles Marineris.
“It really gives you the big picture view of Mars,” says Robert Burnham, part of the team at Arizona State University, Tempe, that created the martian map. It’s more likely to be used by space fans rather than for research purposes, but it does provide a platform for higher resolution images to be added by craft such as Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the planet on 10 March. Have a look at the cool fly-through videos at the THEMIS website (http://themis.asu.edu/) – you can even download special versions onto your iPod.

Al.