In one of the images taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976, a 2 km long Cydonian mesa, situated at 40.75° north latitude and 9.46° west longitude,[9] had the appearance of a humanoid "Face on Mars". When the image was originally acquired, Viking chief scientist Gerry Soffen dismissed the "face" in image 35A72[10] as a "[trick] of light and shadow". Read more
Mars in Google Earth has at least one little hidden secret. There's a search tab just like all the other Google products you can search, and if you search for the Face on Mars, that will take you to a very prominent and well known landmark that, in the 60s, the shadows kind of all collided in a way that made it look like a face. Right next to the face on Mars, there's a little marker for it, is a little chatbot called Meliza and if you click her open you can actually chat with a Martian live. This is based on an old, 1960s artificial intelligence program called Eliza.
Arizona State University researchers and scientists have created two new features for Google Earth 5.0, the popular online application that lets users tour Earth, the starry sky, and the Red Planet Mars. The first of the new features lets anyone, anywhere, recommend places on Mars to photograph with ASU's THEMIS camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. The second new feature shows the most recent infrared images of Mars sent back to Earth from the THEMIS camera. THEMIS is the Thermal Emission Imaging System, a multiband infrared and visual camera designed at ASU by Dr. Philip Christensen. A Regents' Professor of Geological Sciences in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, Christensen is THEMIS' principal investigator and also director of the Mars Space Flight Facility on the Tempe campus.
"These two features, developed by our staff in cooperation with programmers at Google, will help everyone have a lot more fun exploring the Red Planet. It's public engagement at its best" - Dr. Philip Christensen.
Today, NASA and Google announce an update to Mars in Google Earth, a 3D mapping tool for the Red Planet. Originally released with Google Earth 5.0, Mars in Google Earth now contains even more features that give users a sense of how our knowledge of Mars, and our study of astronomy, has evolved over time. After selecting 'Mars' from the toolbar in Google Earth, users fly to a 3D view of the Red Planet, complete with informational layers, imagery, and terrain. The tools for navigation and exploration on Mars are identical to those on Earth - zoom in and out, change the camera view, or spin the entire planet with a click of the mouse.
Google Earth 5 now shows the planet Mars with 3D terrain. Google Mars show data collected from the Mars Global Surveyor and 2001 Mars Odyssey NASA Mars missions. This release includes a layer for high resolution satellite images from the HiRISE imaging system on the Mars Reconnaissance Observatory satellite. It is now possible to view panoramas from the various Mars landers in a similar way to Google Street View.
Google has just launched a new service called "Google Mars" that lets you browse the martian land just as you would with Google Maps.
Google has included three different types of data in Google Mars.
* Elevation - A shaded relief map, generated with data from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. This map is colour-coded by altitude.
* Visible - A mosaic of images taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. MOC is like the digital camera you have at home.
* Infrared - A mosaic of infrared images taken by the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) on NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft. Warmer areas appear brighter, and colder areas are darker. Clouds and dust in the atmosphere are transparent in the infrared.