As a tribute to Percival Lowell, Google geeks have launched Google Mars and placed a space-based logo on their homepage.
Alert readers will remember Google Moon, which maps the Apollo landing sites via the company"s slick mapping interface. Google Mars takes a similar approach, using data from NASA researchers Noel Gorelick and Michael Weiss-Malik, from Arizona State University. It allows users to explore the planet"s (red) surface. You can view the martian landscape by topology, what is visible to the naked eye (think satellite imagery), and an infra red view.
Lowell was an Astronomer working in the 18th and 19th centuries. He described in numerous works on Mars an intricate system of non-natural "canals", designed to channel water around the planet for a presumably alien race.