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Using Google Earth as a Mars Browser
Although there are many issues with putting Mars data into Google Earth, most notably the fact that the best we can currently do is wrap the Earth's sphere in Mars basemaps. However, we can make Google Earth a remarkable tool for locating Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) data by being a little clever.
The steps below outline how to configure Google Earth with Martian basemaps, and then how to plot data from the MRO mission.
Preparing Google Earth
Since all of this will be hung on the Earth, there is no reason to have any of the Earth-related layers on. So bring up Google Earth, and down in the "Layers" panel in the bottom left of the user interface, turn everything off. Borders, labels, roads, etc., and especially Terrain.
This should reduce Google Earth to showing you a perfect sphere with the basic Earth imagery on it.
OnMars
Now we're ready to clothe the Earth in Mars, so to speak. This is significantly easier these days due to the efforts of Lucian Plesea at JPL, and his OnMars servers.
Go to the OnMars Web page, follow the directions there, and pick out a basemap (or all of them). The OnMars_MDIM.kml is a good choice, but having a selection is also handy. Once you download the KML file, just open it with Google Earth. When you do, Google Earth will reach out and stream map data from the OnMars server to your client.
You should now be looking at something that looks very much like Mars in Google Earth. Thank Lucian the next time you see him.
MRO Footprints
Download any of the (.kml) files below, and open it with Google Earth, just like the OnMars file. When you load this file, it will contact the Planetary Image Research Lab (PIRL) servers and pull down the footprint data. The advantage is that we (the HiRISE team) will periodically update the data when there are new PDS releases (which is weekly for HiRISE), and you won't have to ever download a new file to get the latest information.
- HiRISE footprints: HiRISE_PDS.kml
- CTX footprints: CTX_PDS.kml
Hopefully we'll get CRISM soon.
However, if you don't want to have to fetch the data via a network link, either because your network is too slow, or you'll be off the grid, you can directly download the big .kmz files that the above KML files point to (HiRISE_PDS.kmz and CTX_PDS.kmz). Google Earth can directly open these zipped .kmz files. If your Browser or other download agent tries to unzip the file, try to prevent it from doing that. However, once you download the KMZ files, that's the data you have. To get them updated, you'll have to download new ones here (or go back to using the .kml files). So if you want always-up-to-date info, use the network-linked KML files above (think of the .kml files above like bookmarks).
Update (2008 July 15): The amount of data within these files was starting to get very large, so I have regionated the data into a multitude of smaller files which load and unload more quickly. The little KML files that you may have downloaded before should still work to get you to the data. However, I am no longer wrapping things up into .kmz files for off-the-network browsing. If you really, really need this data in an off-line mode, you can download all the files and zip them up yourself.
Update (2009 April): I've been so busy I haven't had a chance to explicitly write an update, but Google, Inc. has released version 5.0 of the Google Earth program which contains a proper Mars mode. So the need for these method of wrapping a basemap around the Earth isn't really needed for Mars anymore. However, the technique can still be applied for other planets.
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Comments
I tried this way back when...
Early on during MRO orbit insertion, I did something similar, hoping to be able to place the HiRISE aerobraking images onto a martian map relatively quickly after they were acquired. I found GE to be exceedingly slow to access both Google's Earth maps and a NASA map server (it's been a while, so I don't know which map server I used). Is this reasonably fast now? I realize I could simply test it for myself, and perhaps I will this evening.
Works for me
Naturally, I'd like to hear your experience with the process, but yes it seems to work fine. Lucian's OnMars server does a great job of delivering the various Mars basemap tiles. I've found that it is very network dependent, and if you're on a slow network, it will be frustrating.
HiRISE on GoogleEarth
I tried this out and found it very easy to implement. I highly recommend it. Many thanks to Lucian and Ross.
Work fine for me
Work fine for me, very thanks. just these (.kml) files ware for Google Earth, I like to try this on Microsoft Virtual Earth 3D, I plan to it can be converted to microsoft files format, hope to can work too, thanks.
Big WOOTZ!
It's been driving me nuts trying to find ALL the available images within any given area, since not all are referenced with the same keyword; and filtering by thematic elements is just, ewww.
I wanna be you guys when I grow up.
Terrain?
This is wonderful, thanks! I've been hoping to use Google Earth and SketchUp as part of a Martian cities talk I'm preparing, and this looks like a good start. Your instructions were clear and direct, and I already have a lovely Mars globe to play with. Thanks!
Any tips on using this or similar data as a replacement for the terrain layer? SketchUp placement requires terrain to work well (details on that), but I'm a bit of a newbie when it comes to Google Earth controls. Either way, I'll post the results here once I have them. Thanks again!
No user-customizable terrain
You're welcome, I'm glad this was useful for you.
The terrain in Google Earth is a server-provided data set, you cannot put custom terrain data into Google Earth with a KML file. So until Google provides terrain data for other planets or allows user-custom terrain data, I think you're out of luck.
kml
Hi,
I also made HiRISE kmls (a red and a color version), you can find them at www.iivault.com/marsdata. I made them by downloading all the .lbls and extracting the latlon info. Because you're on the HiRISE team and because the kmls are updated when new PDS data is available I would like to start using yours.
I've got two suggestions if I may. Perhaps you could make the kml executable so it opens in Google Earth when you click on the link in the browser (see http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/web/more-info-kml-on-google-maps for more info). Second, could you perhaps add a link to the IAS viewer as you can see in my hirise kmls? That really makes mars exploration possible. I hope Google Earth will one day also support JPIP so the HiRISE jpeg2000 data can be viewed directly within Google Earth...
Cheers,
Jelmer Oosthoek
Good ideas
Those are great suggestions.
I've enabled the correct MIME-types on my own server and on the PIRL server that provides the HiRISE and CTX data, which should take care of that first problem. I knew there was something fishy with serving that data, but didn't know enough to hunt it down originally, thank you.
I see that your KML has a link both into the PDS archive and to one of the JP2 versions of the data. I originally decided not to provide links like those in the KML for a couple of reasons, and I continue to think that's the right decision. Firstly, the link that I do provide links into the custom HiRISE data page for every image we release. This page includes links to the PDS archive for all of the data products created from that Observation (the constituent EDRs, the color RDRs, and the RED RDRs), as well as links to the IAS viewer versions of the color and RED RDRs with both lossless and lossy compression, depending on your needs. In short the Web page that I link to is the one-stop shopping for the vast amount of data products related to that Observation. More importantly, as the team decides to provide more data, those pages get updated (and many have team-written, detailed captions). I really don't want to be reproducing those Web pages in the KML info balloon, since they're only a click away, and it would substantially increase the size of the files. The links you want are available, they're just two clicks away instead of one.
re
Yeay, the link to the webpage is very handy indeed, but I guess for more easy Mars exploration with GE I would think the jpip link would be great. I'm afraid that for most people 2 clicks away is a click too much... Together with OnMars you then get an easy approach for everybody to explore Mars (except for 3D). Of course what would be REALLY REALLY handy if GE would support jpip. I guess that could be something for their annual Summer of Code...
Fair enough
We (the HiRISE team) are providing this data as a proof-of-concept. It is not the perfect end-solution, rather I think of it as a "mostly" solution. It gets the job done. However, the NASA Ames Planetary Content team that I work with is working on building a better set of Mars KML. In six months or a year, you might see something that is much more polished and data-rich.
Where did the KML description go ?
Thanks for the updated feed. OpenLayers cannot handle region tags so I'm still going to have to setup GeoServer for the SDW project ( http://spacedatawiki.sourceforge.net/ ).
A question. Where did the description go ? The image description line and link are appearing in GE but I can't see where it is coming from in the KML.
Another thing. For those who want everything in GE, can't external web pages be dynamically loaded into the comment using a link ?
There's also an issue here to do with actually making the source data as easily accessible as possible. Maybe feeds should eventually be produced as GeoRSS, or even XML as well as the KML ? A generic source for any project rather than just KML that is often geared towards GE (good as that is).
DJ Barney
New, regionated KML
So the new KML consists of a very large number of small files. There are essentially 3 zoom levels. If you crawl and pull down all of the files (about 2500) of them, you will see that some start with the prefix "line" and "poly", these are two of the further out zoom levels, and do not have the description information. Only the files that start with "MC-" have all of the gory details.
I don't think that arbitrary Web pages can be loaded into the info balloon, but I could be wrong.
Sure, I believe that some combination of the PDS and the Astrogeology group at the USGS are working on providing planetary data in a more generic sense via W*S-type servers, but that is still some way off.
Suggestions for downloading
Can anyone suggest a way of automating the download process for each of the MC-*.kml files located in http://pirlwww.lpl.arizona.edu/~rbeyer/kml/MROteam/HiRISE_team/ ?
I need the full set of footprints every couple of weeks to update an ArcGIS server application (http://macmillan.brown.edu/MRO_Viewer/), and I'm hoping I don't have to (indeed I can't take the time to) download all the files individually.
I tried ssh but that did not work. I also tried opening the HiRise_PDS.kml from http://rossbeyer.net/science/kml in GE. The footprints appear just fine, but for some reason, this .kml file will no longer open in the application I am using to convert .kml to shape.
Thanks for any suggestions
SpaceDataWiki Project Script
You could use, or modify the script I have written for the project Space Data Wiki. Here it is ...
http://spacedatawiki.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/spacedatawiki/scripts/bash/sdw_hirisefeed/trunk/sdw_hirisefeed?revision=12&view=markup
This is the main project site ... http://sourceforge.net/projects/spacedatawiki/ ... and webpage ... http://spacedatawiki.sourceforge.net/
If you use anything then please mention the project as it needs developers :)
DJ Barney
hirise footprints
Hi, you could try wget (http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/)
I've also made esri shapefiles using the http://hirise-pds.lpl.arizona.edu/PDS/INDEX/RDRCUMINDEX.TAB file and OGR2OGR (http://fwtools.maptools.org/), perhaps you could use them:
http://www.iivault.com/marsdata/HiRISEfootprints_Nov2008_Orbit10180_COLOR.zip
http://www.iivault.com/marsdata/HiRISEfootprints_Nov2008_Orbit10180_RED.zip
Cheers, Jelmer
I like to hear your
I like to hear your experience with the process. I've been hoping to use Google Earth and SketchUp as part of a Martian cities talk I'm preparing, and this looks like a good start.
This is very good post and
This is very good post and good idea to use google earth as a mars browser.
Google Earth 5
I saw Google Earth 5 has a Mars feature (!). I guess your KML files are also used?
Yes, kind of
So I am a part of the Planetary Content group here at NASA Ames that worked with Google, Inc. (nice meeting you at LPSC, Jelmer), to translate NASA's data into a format usable by Google Earth. So the KML files that I have distributed for about a year or so now (and for which people on this thread and elsewhere gave me lots of good feedback) were a kind of rough draft for the layers which you can see in Mars in Google Earth (of course the ones we delivered in GE are much prettier than my rough drafts).
google mar explorer
Hi,
yep i use this mars explorer browser . And its really amazing and informative. I am a big fan of space exploration. Well hopping for life as you all know rover is on its way to big creator . So may be there some water or information they get.
Regards,
Alex
I found out that Google Earth
I found out that Google Earth 5 is fully compatible with my Modified Mars add-on. The terraforming map folds itself over the terrain which adds a whole new dimension and looks especially great using the flight simulator!
Only the sea looks a bit rough, since that part also folds itself on the terrain; as far as I can see there's no way to define a continuous blue surface around the whole planet.
(It seems wise to first set GE to Mars and then open the kmz; at least my computer crashed a few times when I tried it the other way around.)
I saw this on reddit.com,
I saw this on reddit.com, pretty awesome.
Lucian is good! I really like
Lucian is good! I really like the new feature stemming from Google Earth, thanks for directing me to this.
Best Regards
Jay