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!

	Elevation = Colorized MOLA (Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter) – I find this the most useful map to orient myself on the planet when I zoom pretty far out. The map isn’t very high resolution, but large global-scale features are easily identifiable.
	Visible = MOC (Mars Orbital Camera) wide-angle map. In this example, the visible map is clouded over by bright haze. That’s actually typical for this region – because it has such a low elevation, clouds form there during most of the year.
	Infrared = THEMIS (THermal EMission Imaging System) daytime IR – these maps are high-resolution, so they’re good for close-in context. They’re harder to interpret, though, because most people aren’t used to looking at infrared (IR) images. IR observations measure the temperature of the surface, not albedo (brightness/darkness) like a regular visible-light image. You do see shapes in daytime IR, like you would see in a visible image; shapes are detected because shadows are darker (and thus cooler) than sunlit areas. In addition, though, you can also get an idea of the type of material in an IR image. For example, dusty areas will be brighter in daytime IR images because they heat up faster during the day. Rocky areas will be darker, because it takes them longer to warm up from the cold night. (This article has a good explanation of this, using White Rock as an example.)

Using these maps, I was able to figure out that the “enigmatic terrain” in the above picture (PSP_009548_1420) is in the western part of Hellas Basin, which is a large, deep depression in the southern hemisphere of Mars. I could also tell it’s part of a larger isolated patch of this type of stuff, which seems to run concentrically along the inside of the basin rim. In this case I could have figured some of that out from the caption and the coordinates, but this is more fun.

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!