Friday, July 18, 2014

The First Man on Mars


There have been a number of Google Maps over the years which plot the locations mentioned in works of fiction. Andy Weir's The Martian Map is the first Google Map to plot a novel set on Mars.

In Andy Weir's 'The Martian' NASA astronaut Mark Watney is abandoned on Mars after the rest of his crew are forced to leave him behind. Watney is then forced to drive a Mars rover 2,000 miles across the planet to Schiaparelli Crater in order to be picked up by another NASA mission.

The Martian Map plots the course of Watney's journey to Schiaparelli Crater and some of the incidents he encounters along the way. The map uses the Google Mars base map layers. These layers are not directly accessible in v3 of the Google Maps API, however you can use them by using this Planetary Map Types example.

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