Google Moon, Google Mars, and Beyond

There is a vast store of planetary geospatial data that has been collected by NASA but is difficult to access by the general public. The Google Maps API is one way to allow broad access to this data. Google Mars was the first serious effort to display high-quality planetary data within the Google Maps API, but was essentially a closed product. Users could not easily build on the Google Mars framework as has been done to great effect and diversity with the main Google Maps API for the Earth. NASA Ames Research Center and Google, Inc., are working in collaboration to provide extension capabilities to planetary data sets hosted via the Google Maps API. We are working on updates and enchancements of the existing Google Moon. Among others, we will showcase a data layer for Google Moon that provides placemarks for publications about features or regions on the Moon. These placemarks contain basic bibliographic information and links to sources of more detailed information about each publication. This layer represents a major data collection effort, and we will only have a demo version available at the meeting. The Google Maps API allows anyone to add data and build upon the existing frameworks for Google Moon and Google Mars, in the same way that is currently widely done for the main Google Maps system. Enhancing this functionality will not only enable Planetary Scientists to more easily build and share data within the scientific community, but will also provide an easy platform for public outreach and education efforts, and will easily allow anyone to layer geospatial information on top of planetary data within the Google Maps framework. In the future we hope to add additional data to Google Mars, and create Google Maps versions of other planets in the solar system, vastly increasing the public's ability to easily access NASA's store of planetary geospatial information.