By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006

The empire of Google Inc. is officially going interplanetary.

Working with researchers from NASA at Arizona State University, the search engine has compiled images of Mars on a map Web site, making it possible to view the dunes, canyons and craters of the red planet as easily as the cul-de-sacs and cityscapes of Earth.

Infrared images at http://mars.google.com even pull up things normally invisible to the naked eye.

Having mapped the Earth and the relatively nearby moon, Google said seeking out farther-flung planetary conquests is a natural progression.

"It was a very interesting and creative and cool way to apply technology we already had to another planet," said Chikai Ohazama, product manager for Google Earth.

According to one Google-focused blog, the company plans to put images of the other major planets of the solar system online, as well. It has secured domain names such as GoogleMercury, GoogleVenus and GoogleJupiter, even though it appears that image data of other planets isn't available.

"We don't have anything to announce about other planets at this time," a Google spokeswoman said.