You can now explore moons and planets with Google Maps
Get excited, space fans.
Google just rolled out a new Maps feature showing off some of our favorite planetary neighbors.
The new Maps feature label images of our moon, Mercury, Venus, Pluto, the International Space Station, and a number of icy moons that orbit the outer planets like Saturn (as seen by the Cassini spacecraft, which just reached the end of its mission at the ringed planet in September) and Jupiter.
"During its mission, Cassini recorded and sent nearly half a million pictures back to Earth, allowing scientists to reconstruct these distant worlds in unprecedented detail," Google said in a blog post announcing the new feature.
"Now you can visit these places — along with many other planets and moons — in Google Maps right from your computer."
That said, the new maps aren't perfect.
As the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla pointed out on Twitter Monday, the maps of at least some of the moons appear to have mislabelled craters and features. Lakdawalla explained that the map names and features are off by about 180 degrees.
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A good example of the issue is on Saturn's moon Mimas, which has a distinctly Death Star-like appearance thanks to the huge Herschel crater on one side of the moon.
Lakdawalla pointed out that the Google map labels Herschel as a crater on the exact opposite side of the world instead of the actual location of the crater.
While Lakdawalla has been in touch with Google about the errors, it seems that the company has yet to fix the problem.
Topics Google
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
