Google Mercury: The Launch of a New Planet

The NASA MESSENGER mission’s Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Team, in cooperation with Google, Inc., has launched Google Mercury, an immersive new environment on the Google Earth platform. Google Mercury features hundreds of surface features, most of them newly revealed by the three flybys of the innermost planet by the MESSENGER spacecraft. As with Google Earth, Google Mercury is available on line at no cost. This presentation will demonstrate how our team worked with Google staff, features we incorporated, how games can be developed within the Google Earth platform, and how others can add tours, games, and other educational features. Finally, we will detail new enhancements to be added once MESSENGER enters into orbit about Mercury in March 2011 and begins sending back compelling images and other global data sets on a daily basis. The MESSENGER EPO Team comprises individuals from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); Carnegie Academy for Science Education (CASE); Center for Educational Resources (CERES) at Montana State University (MSU) - Bozeman; National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE); Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL); National Air and Space Museum (NASM); Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI); and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Screen shot of Google Mercury as a work in progress