Now you can explore Mars with version 5 of Google’s 3D exploration software (still called Earth)! HiRISE team members worked with Google to make this possible. Previously, you had to perform a few tricks to get it going, but now it is all built in smoothly. To switch to Mars. select the planet drop-down at the top center.

You can enable footprints for HiRISE, CTX, CRISM, Mars Express’ HRSC and Global Surveyor’s MOC.

By clicking on a HiRISE footprint, you can get a window with a hi-res preview and a link to the observation page on our website.

A nice addition is text from (our fellow Tucsonan) William K. Hartmann’s A Traveler’s Guide To Mars, explaining the geologic provinces on Mars (click on the green ‘hiker’ icons).

You can see screenshots and get more info from the unofficial Google Earth blog and download Windows, Mac or Linux versions from Google’s Earth site.

It looks like there is some broad-scale elevation data. Shift+up or down tilts your view, shift + right or left spins, and page up / page down zooms.

Have fun exploring Mars!

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!

I should note that these are not planned to be actual HiRISE images; I was using HiPlan in test mode while working on the display of the individual HiRISE CCD footprints.

Take a look at this screenshot. It covers a small region of Mars roughly one degree across and slightly less than a degree tall:

The low-resolution background is THEMIS daytime infrared imagery at 256 pixels per degree; it is an amalgamation of several such infrared THEMIS images. This view was displayed in HiPlan at 1024 pixels per degree, so the background looks quite blocky.

The sharper region down the center of the screenshot is the upper portion of a single THEMIS visible spectrum image. It is a much higher-resolution image, so it appears quite a bit sharper than the background. The black border surrounding the visible spectrum image is an artifact of the simplified image processing used in HiPlan; in order to show quickly multiple sets of data overlain atop one another, corners almost literally have to be cut.

The colorful, translucent rectangle cutting across the crater is a typical HiRISE “footprint”—that is, it is the area of Mars that would be imaged by our camera were we actually to take this picture.

You might know that HiRISE consists of 14 individual CCDs, arranged in a row 10 CCDs across with the remaining four positioned in the middle of the array. This arrangement is illustrated in the screenshot by the reddish and greenish rectangles within the blue rectangle.

An additional level of zoom in the planning software shows these red and green rectangles more clearly. This second screenshot covers an area about a half-degree wide and a half-degree high; the image data are shown at 2048 pixels per degree:

Each of the red rectangles represents one of the ten red-filter HiRISE CCDs. You probably notice that there are only eight visible. The other two are hidden by the green rectangles.

Each of the green rectangles represents one of the blue-green filter HiRISE CCDs. As mentioned, they’re covering up the central red-filter CCD rectangles. They’re also covering up the two near-infrared filter (NIR) CCD rectangles, which would be drawn a translucent white. If I had set these HiRISE images up without the blue-green CCDs active, you’d see the NIR CCDs clearly.

The next two screenshots form another pair from roughly the same region of Mars. The first is with HiPlan zoomed to 1024 pixels per degree, covering about one degree of width of the surface of Mars:

The blue lines running through this screenshot canted slightly to the HiRISE footprint are THEMIS footprints. I’ve chosen not to have HiPlan fill them in.

The second is the same area zoomed to 2048 pixels per degree; it covers a region about a half-degree across:

What about the blue regions at the ends of the HiRISE footprints? In order to coordinate HiRISE observations with those planned by other instruments aboard MRO, we always plan on slightly larger observations than we really take. In addition to making the coordination planning easier, it allows us to change the size of our observation or move it around slightly after the spacecraft-level instructions have been sent, but before our actual instrument instructions are delivered.

Normally, we center our actual observation within the blue planning zone. We could easily adjust it, however. In the case of the second set of screenshots, for instance, we might decide to slide our observation downward towards the couple of small craters near the bottom of the planning zone. We can do so without interfering with the operation of the spacecraft as a whole and without having to re-plan our coordination with the other instruments.

I started this post by claiming it might give you a feel for the size of a HiRISE image. I haven’t forgotten. If you click on one of the thumbnails above, you will get a full-size rendition of the planning screenshot. Each screenshot is 1024 pixels wide.

Take a look at just one of the red-filter HiRISE CCDs (or one of the blue-green filter CCDs; I’m not picky). If HiRISE were to take the picture planned here in these screenshots, you could fit two of those screenshots, side-by-side, across that red-filter CCD outline, and you could fit a few dozen down its length.

We’ll be able to display acquired HiRISE images in HiPlan in the near future, much like we can see acquired THEMIS images, though we’ll probably never be able to display them at full resolution. They’re too big!

One final note: HiPlan is built atop an application developed up at ASU called JMARS. Not coincidentally, the THEMIS team uses JMARS to plan their images.