Google Mars (2005)

https://www.google.com/mars/

by belter • 3 years ago

195 80 3 years ago

google.com

cryptoz• 3 years ago

Always love playing with this especially after reading Red Mars and recognizing a lot of place names.

But also sad google hasn’t even kept the styling updated to their branding or added any features.

dchest• 3 years ago

I love the fact that they haven't updated styling: this one is clear and fast.

holoduke• 3 years ago

Except it keeps focusing on the input screen and opens my keyboard all the time.

xchkr1337• 3 years ago

I don't think that's a good point to critizice Google for. Unlike many other websites, the Google homepage has always remained clear and fast, even after multiple redesigns.

lnxg33k1• 3 years ago

I didn’t know Mars had the same streets state of my hometown

belter4• 3 years ago

https://www.google.com/sky/

https://www.google.com/moon/

HopenHeyHi• 3 years ago

Woah, check out this page: https://www.google.com/sky/about.html

2011 in the footer. Remnants of the old google of a by-gone era. Simultaneously feels both like yesterday and an eternity ago.

The video is from 2008: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9MeF2Au9c

I bet whoever made this is no longer there and it has been forgotten about internally.

belter4• 3 years ago

The comments from 15 years ago are even more interesting.

tazjin2• 3 years ago

There was a time where employees could get paths under google.com/ for semi-personal projects.

lib-dev• 3 years ago

It would be cool if they updated Google Sky to use JWST images.

Ajedi32• 3 years ago

Mars is also built in to Google Maps now: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/

nickcotter• 3 years ago

I thought I was about to read that it had been discontinued. Glad to see it hasn’t!

cabirum• 3 years ago

You have 30 days to pack your things and move to another planet. You remaining Google Mars subscription will be refunded to your account.

thefounder• 3 years ago

For some reasons steet view is not working! Hope they fix it soon!

belter4• 3 years ago

Privacy rules, they have the same in Germany.

FinnKuhn• 3 years ago

Just wanted to point out that legally nothing is stopping Google from releasing Street View in Germany as far as I know. Maybe they will do so soon, considering that Apple Look Around is available for most of Germany

butz• 3 years ago

They should partner up with NASA and add "Street view".

tempodox2• 3 years ago

My summer house on Mars is private, I don't want a Street View image of it.

dredmorbius2• 3 years ago

And to this comment future generations will trace the origin of the Tempodox Effect, as the Martian analog of Barbra's.

nabla9• 3 years ago

Google data scraping is not that good. Olympus Mons is not listed in mountains as other volcanoes.

   Feature: Olympus Mons
   Type: Mons, montes

patwolf• 3 years ago

I miss the days when I'd see a HN post to a Google project and be excited to check it out.

I don't necessarily fault Google--they have to do what makes sense for their business. But I wish, at the very least from a PR perspective, more companies would create cool things without worrying about whether they can be monetized.

dr_kiszonka• 3 years ago

I do miss it too. What is the point in having so much money if you can't do exciting, useful, and cool stuff.

capableweb• 3 years ago

The basic equation:

- Small, nimble, fun, fast, low amount of cash, interesting work, ease to deploy

- Big, fat, tedious, slow, extensive supply of cash, maybe some interesting work at most, pain to get anything deployed

tppiotrowski2• 3 years ago

Someone once told me that Mars has better elevation data than Earth. Maybe it's the quality of the orbiters or maybe it's the fact that there is less atmospheric interference and you can use LiDAR vs radar? Can anyone confirm?

bdon, if you're reading this we need a protomaps archive for the moon and Mars :)

kvdveer• 3 years ago

I thought that earth elevation data is unreliable in forested areas, as vegetation hides the true elevation of those areas. That's probably not a significant problem on Mars...

tppiotrowski2• 3 years ago

I think vegetation is an issue with LiDAR but my understanding is that radar penetrates down to the ground.

tmoravec• 3 years ago

My guess would be that they meant the oceans. No water = better elevation data.

jsmcgd• 3 years ago

Here's another 3D Mars surface explorer: https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/SceneView/MurrayLabCT...

Edit: Searching through my notes, I realised I've been down this rabbit hole before. Here are some more of the same:

https://explore-mars.esri.com/

http://www.mars3dmap.com

https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/24881/planet-mars-3d-model/

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

don't forget Eyes on the Solar System, WorldWind, Cosmographia, JMars, and USGS PILOT

zokier3• 3 years ago

If you want higher res, check out the recently released Murray Lab CTX global mosaic:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/new-interactive-mosaic-uses...

https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/index.html

throwaway199956• 3 years ago

Any idea of high res images from Tianwen-1, as per reports they have imaged most of Mars surface, and being a more recent mission, may have better camera.

zokier3• 3 years ago

Found a chinese map here: https://moon.bao.ac.cn/Mars/index/index.html

From the looks of it, it might be Tianwen-1 MoRIC (100m/px) data. But I'm not sure, I always have difficulty navigating non-NASA data sources.

I don't think the higher resolution HiRIC (up to 2.5m/px) data is publicly available. I don't also know what sort of coverage they have for it.

But in general it's not just having the data, stitching a global mosaic is a non-trivial effort. Afaik the Murray Lab mosaic took several years of work to make.

There is also HRSC from ESA that has been imaging Mars with fairly good resolution/coverage.

And finally also UAE Hope mission has produced global map, but I haven't been able to find their full-resolution data. https://nyuad.nyu.edu/en/news/latest-news/science-and-techno...

tempodox2• 3 years ago

Yay, great! Here's the raw mosaic, make your browser full-screen for this:

https://murray-lab.caltech.edu/CTX/V01/SceneView/MurrayLabCT...

timur21• 3 years ago

Always wanted this

amelius• 3 years ago

I want to select A on Earth and B on Mars, then click "Directions".

ml_basics• 3 years ago

Check out the scale, those are very tall peaks in the centre at 21km!

weird-eye-issue• 3 years ago

No directions?

booleandilemma• 3 years ago

I don't understand how Google could have this and yet they don't have high res images of the Earth's oceans.

XorNot• 3 years ago

The data doesn't exist. You can't map oceans from space like you can land.

godber4• 3 years ago

Hahaha, that was a busy weekend when this launched in like 2005-2006. I was one of the sysadmins of the website with the THEMIS images. Google promoted it directly below the search box. Which made my web servers 3 clicks away from Google’s front page. I spent the weekend cannibalizing compute nodes from one of our clusters to work as caching proxies. It all worked out pretty well.

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

Very cool, thanks for sharing. It's fascinating to me that google has put so little effort into their planetary maps since an inital burst of interest, but hasn't killed them yet. Is it just "below the radar"? I guess I assumed they would have some management process that kills zombie projects... don't they?

imajoredinecon• 3 years ago

From my experience working there, killing a cute toy project like this takes some breaking change in a dependency plus nobody willing to spend a few hours every now and then to maintain it. Both of these are basically luck of the draw, so it’s not surprising to have stuff like this stick around for this long.

godber4• 3 years ago

Since this is built on top of google maps, I suspect the only marginal cost of keeping it is keeping the 10s of MB of (MAYBE 100s MB) of data around. The cost of the labor to delete it is probably more than another 100 years of serving it.

There’s no real money in the planetary data. All of my colleagues who worked on that have gone on to Google and to work on Google Maps or Google Earth Engine, which do generate revenue. This project ended up ultimately being a recruitment effort on Google’s part.

rixrax• 3 years ago

Search located Pathfinder without problems[0]. But not the Ares III landing site[1]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)

FR10• 3 years ago

Having recently finished the book (awesome btw), Acidalia Planitia, Pathfinder and Schiaparelli where my first 3 queries

godber4• 3 years ago

The site was launched about 5 years before the book was written.

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

It's been kept fairly up to date

foobarbecue3• 3 years ago

I've always been really disapointed that google let their planetary maps stagnate.

I work (~5% of my work week) on https://trek.nasa.gov/ . Our front page sucks, but the individual map browsers are quite rich in terms of available layers and tools. Our UI is... not optimized for discoverability, but there's a lot there. Mars is at https://trek.nasa.gov/mars/

somat• 3 years ago

Was about to post a link to the same, can confirm, perhaps not as slick as googles offering but a much better map, it actually has a scale bar and tools to help you measure things.

silvertaza• 3 years ago

If the visible map here is gray, why is it red-ish in the sky looking at it with the naked eye?

willidiots• 3 years ago

https://wehoville.com/2013/01/07/why-are-images-from-space-p...

zokier3• 3 years ago

That article feels overly dismissive. Notably more recent Mars missions such as Tianwen and Hope do have normal bayer cameras onboard producing color images.

marricks• 3 years ago

It's been out for over 15 years now, you'd hope they'd add some street view...

antonvs• 3 years ago

The problem is the only car that could drive around Mars to take street pictures is in a heliocentric orbit instead. There was some sort of requirements mixup.

jonnycomputer• 3 years ago

street view?

dndn1• 3 years ago

How do they pick a 0 elevation?

lmc• 3 years ago

Good question! it's the average. https://mars.nasa.gov/mgs/faqs/faq_sci.html

breck• 3 years ago

I had never really paid attention to the fact that all the craters are round. If anyone else is just noticing that, this explains it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-are-impact-cr...

Aldipower• 3 years ago

Wow, this old site is exceptionally fast!

m3kw9• 3 years ago

No walking directions?

p1mrx• 3 years ago

Seems weird that the "Mountains" link doesn't label Olympus Mons. It's the tallest mountain in the solar system.

cdibona• 3 years ago

Noel and Michael launched mars and moon in about three weeks after starting as 'interns' under me, as that was the fastest path to a badge. They're both still at Google, I think. (As employees!)

Someday I'll write up the story, but that was a heck of a fun project!

aix1• 3 years ago

Wow, things... have changed.

Thanks for sharing.

smallnix• 3 years ago

(As employees!)

Cracked me up

godber4• 3 years ago

Lol, Noel as an intern.

pcurve• 3 years ago

Wonder why they haven't killed this yet. I guess hardly anyone knows this exists

SergeAx• 3 years ago

What, no Street View? Why?

mock-possum• 3 years ago

weird that there's no map scale provided - like a "___ = 1km" legend thingy

also the silver/gold infrared map reminds me of Brinstar in the original Metroid.

flaviut• 3 years ago

Check this newer version: https://www.google.com/maps/space/mars/@17.5325978,179.82741...

They also have many other planets and celestial bodies here.

pfannkuchen• 3 years ago

If Google still had a sense of humor they would do Google Flat Earth for April Fool’s Day one of these years. Complete with perimeter ice wall and an announcement that scientists have made an amazing discovery about the true shape of the Earth. Easter egg of infinite turtle stack supporting the Earth Plane if you do 3D view and flip it over. Alas…

Google Mars (2005)

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