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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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/
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.
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…
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.
Sometimes you chicken out, and someone else does it ...
To wit: around the same time, Google tossed out some service that would listen to your computer's mic for room sounds (such as a TV broadcast), and provide helpful info.
I guess people were creeped out, thing was shut down, and now we have Amazon's version ...
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
It was more of a media campaign, ad brokers trying to kneecap that other ad broker. Microsoft wasn't in the ad business back in the day, so no threat to media businesses.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
That article feels overly dismissive. Notably more recent Mars missions such as Tianwen and Hope do have normal bayer cameras onboard producing color images.
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.
