UPDATE: Great minds, and all that: Google Mars
We’ve got a brand-new eye orbiting Mars that’s gonna tell us all sorts of interesting new things about the Red Planet, and another eye far out in the Solar System has found liquid water on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, a tantalyzing clue to possibility of life on another world in our immediate neighborhood.
And a new-ish tool is rapidly changing how we see our own planet: amaetur geologist Emilio González used Google Earth to spot impact craters on the surface of our world that no one else had identified before. This is extraordinary -- suddenly, there is another scientific arena (like astronomy) in which dedicated amateurs can make genuine breakthroughs and discoveries.
But there’s an even more geeky-cool aspect -- as González says:
[T]he most important thing of this history is, probably, that using a free distributed software (Google Earth, but I'm also using NASA World Wind) anyone can search for similar structures.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that in only a matter of day, crater fever has swept the Web. ThinkLemon, for instance, has a “new database containing all the known suspected earth impact craters” as well as a “collection of suspected and/or confirmed craters.” And lots of new craters are being uncovered.
The Google Earth blog Ogle Earth thinks it knows what’s going on:
My guess is that until Google Earth came out, there was far more desert and tundra than there were scientists looking at satellite pictures of desert and tundra. Until a year ago, much of this imagery had to be bought, and that would have been too costly for individuals or even bored scientists — after all, why buy imagery of a specific area on the off chance you find a crater?
Cool as they are, distrubiting computing projects like SETI@home, Folding@home (Stanford’s investigation into protein folding), and the BBC’s new Climate Change Experiment are passive -- they harness a individual desktop computer’s power but don’t demand any effort on the computer owner’s part. The beauty of Google Earth is that it demands that you play with it, that you figure out for yourself all the neat things you can do with it. It’s maybe the most sophisticated geek toy ever.
I bet the new Mars Reconaissance Orbiter will supply the first images for Google Mars...
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