The recently released Google Earth 5.0 lets users take a virtual ride through deep canyons and across vast plains, but not only on the planet you’d expect. The program also lets you tour Mars and access observations made by the CRISM imaging spectrometer on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
 
“We’re thrilled to be included in Google Earth 5.0, which will allow our data to reach an even broader audience,” says Scott Murchie, CRISM’s principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “It’s also a nice way to celebrate the start of our Extended Science Phase.”

CRISM team member Chris Hash, of Applied Coherent Technology, helped format the observations for inclusion in Google Earth 5.0, although he was kept in the dark on exactly where his efforts would lead.

“We created a more efficient way to serve up the CRISM observations,” explains Hash, “But our colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center, who coordinated the contributions from MRO and other Mars missions, couldn’t provide a lot of details on Google’s exact plans for the data before the new release.”

Google Earth 5.0 only scratches the surface of the approximately 15 terabytes of processed data from more than 9,000 targeted observations CRISM made during MRO's Primary Science Phase, which ended in December 2008. MRO is now in its Extended Science Phase and CRISM continues to collect data.

To view Mars in Google Earth 5.0, download the free program. From the toolbar, click on the Saturn-like icon and choose Mars from the drop-down menu. Under Spacecraft Imagery on the left side of your screen, choose "CRISM Image Browser" to see the blue squares marking CRISM’s observations. Each of the squares provides a link to that image's own Web page showing various map products created from the data.