Google expanded its online mapping service to a third celestial body last week with ASU's help.
Programmers from ASU's Mars Space Flight Facility worked with the search engine to load composite images of the Red Planet into Google Mars (mars.google.com).
"It's been six months of hard work with Google," said Greg Mehall, ASU Mars mission manager.
The new Web site resembles Google's earthly maps site, which has been modified before to create a moon-mapping site.
Carol Hughes, spokeswoman for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said ASU researchers proposed the project to Google and spent nights and weekends putting it together.
"We got together with Google … and said, 'We've got this great NASA data and we'd like to make it available to the public,'" Hughes said.
Users can view and zoom in on an image color-coded by elevation, the visible surface of the planet or an ASU-produced image that shows differences in temperature on the planet's surface.
"All three data sets merged together tells you all you need," Mehall said.
The search engine linked to the newly launched site from its home page with a modified version of the company logo.
"They made a custom logo for us," Mehall said. "Those are hard to get."
Mehall said ASU wanted to launch the Web site exactly four years after the University's infrared camera started taking photos.
But that date fell during the Winter Olympics, when Google featured sports-themed logos.
"They wouldn't let us supercede the Olympics," he said. "So they came up with Percival Lowell's birthday as a release date."
Lowell - the namesake of a Flagstaff, Ariz., observatory - would have turned 151 March 13. He drew a map of Mars based on telescope observations in 1895.
"For his time, that was revolutionary," Mehall said. "That was the best sketch ever done of Mars."
Now, ASU's Thermal Emission Imaging System provides the best picture of the planet because its infrared images aren't clouded by the martian atmosphere, he added.
"It's the best global map we have," Mehall said. "We're hoping the scientific community will start using this as their base map."
ASU's infrared camera has been orbiting 250 miles above Mars since 2002. Warmer areas show up in lighter shades of gray in the images it takes, each of which shows one sliver of the planet.
"We've taken those 17,000 images to build a mosaic of the whole planet," Mehall said.
Student and faculty researchers worked to line up the images and account for the different seasons and times of day when the photos were taken.
Individual images were already available on ASU's Web site.
"This is great for scientists trying to find data," Mehall said while navigating the ASU site. "But it's not great to browse."
Mehall said the Google site made it easier to share results of publicly funded Mars research with taxpayers.
"It's a nice way for the non-NASA people to sit at home and explore Mars," Mehall said.
Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriguez said in an e-mail the site would make Mars data "accessible and useful" to people worldwide.
Mehall said he hopes the site will also bring publicity to ASU.
Google Mars pinpoints geological formations and links to pages about them on ASU's Mars Web site (themis.asu.edu).
The ASU Mars site received about 29 million hits between last Monday's launch of Google Mars and 4 p.m. Friday, system administrator Chris Kurtz said. The site only received 1.7 million total hits March 1-12.
Last week's hits came from about 285,000 separate individuals, he added.
Kurtz said the Mars project used about 5 percent of ASU's total Internet-traffic capacity the day Google Mars launched.
But he said ASU anticipated the influx of Web visitors and avoided the crashes that usually accompany a Web site's rise to fame.
"We survived," he said. "We were ready for it."
By Friday the site was taking up less than one half of a percent of the University's bandwidth, Kurtz said in an e-mail.
"But that's still more than double - almost triple - our usual traffic," he added.
Reach the reporter at brian.indrelunas@asu.edu.
