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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society. 

Color map of Mars: Viking Orbiter MDIM 2.1

A new map of Mars from some pretty old data

The United States Geological Survey recently issued an improved version of the Viking color map of Mars. This 40-year-old data set still provides the prettiest global-scale map of the planet.

Phil Stooke's Opportunity route maps (updated to sol 4495)

Book Review: The International Atlas of Mars Exploration, by Phil Stooke

I've been waiting for the publication of this book for years. Phil Stooke's International Atlas of Mars Exploration, just published by Cambridge University Press, is an exhaustively awesome labor of love, chronicling the first five decades of Mars exploration in pictures, maps, and facts.

Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter map of Mars

Bringing MOLA altimetry tracks into Google Mars

I've had a fun morning of noodling around learning how to write KML files, and have produced one for Google Mars that shows you all of the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter tracks that cross the area Opportunity has driven through already, as well as the area of Endeavour crater.

Google Mars: Pollack Crater

Find pics and track the rovers in Google Mars

I think a goodly proportion of you readers have already figured this out for yourselves since it was launched last March, but I didn't download and install it until last weekend, so this is new to me: Google Mars is awesome.

Map of Mars' south pole by Herschel

Mapping Mars, now and in history

Planetary cartographer Phil Stooke has been working on a cool project to compose and compare maps of Mars that show how we saw the planet throughout the Space Age.

Mars during the 2003 opposition

Finding images from Mars

There have been so many missions to Mars, which have sent back so much data, that figuring out how to find images of places on Mars can be really overwhelming.

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