“Google Mars” (kind of)
One of our team members, Ross Beyer, put together a way of getting MRO data into the Google Earth tool: http://orrery.us/node/54
I finally got around to trying it out, and it’s very easy to set up following his instructions. It allows you to see the footprints of acquired HiRISE images on a larger context map, and the Google [Planet] interface is really easy to use. Clicking on a red H footprint gives you a short description of the image, and a link right to our image release page, where you can browse or download the image products. CTX footprints are available, too. If I’m understanding this right, these KML files pull all currently released data from the PDS, so whenever we release data, the new stuff is automatically included.
The basemaps aren’t in 3-D (yet – maybe someday?!), so the perspective view isn’t much use, but you can kind of trick yourself into thinking it looks 3-D with the shaded relief maps. You can “fly” over the planet, zooming in & out, which is really fun.
I had trouble trying to get two basemaps visible at once (colorized MOLA elevation over the greyscale MDIM). With just one basemap, though, it works just fine, and it’s very fast (this probably depends a lot on your internet connection).
One really nice thing about the Google interface is when there are two overlapping footprints (which all of our stereo images are), clicking on them expands the choices and allows you to pick one or the other. Other tools I’ve used don’t handle this as nicely, and sometimes it’s impossible to select the “bottom” one.
Nice job, Ross & Google! 
February 5th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Can anyone tell me if the PSP_006250_2200_cut_b image is a stereo image? It is interesting to see such dramatic features which match so closely those made in my experiments. http://www.geocities.com/dhlndsign/tight_po_crtr_2.90s85h.jpg
Great things are coming from the HiRes efforts. Thanks,,,, dzp
February 25th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
This is really great work. As I am totally not into stuff like this I browsed in great resolution and speed around that planets.
It would be great to have a bi-lingual version, I am sure some universities would love to work with this tool.
February 28th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
The OnMars layers are at the same exact order, so you can’t have two enabled at the same or they collide.
That could be fixed. Any thought about serving the image data itself to GE? I should be able to help
March 10th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Hey there Lucian.. long time no see.
But you have a point.. why do it what seems to be in a painful way? You would be better off using a WMS server and thus make the data available to a wider array of people than just GE users.
March 21st, 2008 at 7:27 am
Greetings Lucian,
It’s been a while. First I would like to thank you for all your tremendous work with your WMS servers. They have become a crtical part of our daily programs with school children. As you may know, we have a portable dome running Uniview which we take to schools around Minnesota. As a matter of course in our lessons, we go to the edge of the WMAP and back and seemlessly stream WMS data from OnEarth and NEO. We have just started to work with the OnMars and other On* servers you are running.
I would highly endorse a move to server MRO data via WMS. As mentioned, there is a bigger world of users than GE, and those of us in the Planetarium world who are running Uniview, would be able to share this data spatially with the public as we fly to Mars.
I don’t know what the NASA and AU plan is for doing this, but we would welcome a chance to share this data with school kids in our dome. Also, the IPS meetings in June in Chicago, would be an ideal time to further share MRO with the Planetarium community.
Thanks again, and keep up the great work!
Joel Halvorson
Director of Programming
Minnesota Plantearium Society