Google Maps Satellite | Universe Today

Written by Fraser Cain

I think one of greatest, and unexpected benefits of the space program (and the internet) is all the publicly accessible satellite maps. You can pretty much see any spot on Earth in a high resolution satellite photograph.

And one of these is Google Maps. You can access Google Maps through a web browser on any computer connected to the internet. When you first load up the web page, you see a zoomed out view of the entire Earth. You can drag around the map and zoom in and out to any spot on the planet. You can enter a specific address location and see that spot from overhead; often at high enough resolution to make out cars and sometimes even people.

Google uses several different satellites to capture the images in Google Maps, so there's no one Google Maps satellite. For low resolution images, they're using publicly available images taken by NASA's Landsat satellite, or Terra satellite. They're using other NASA satellites for higher resolution images, but for the highest resolution images, they have an exclusive partnership with the Geoeye satellite company. The Geoeye-1 satellite is a commercial earth observation satellite capable of imaging the surface of the ground at a resolution of 0.5 meters.

Google has actually branched out. They don't just have Google Earth and Google Maps for our planet. They've got similar products for the Moon and Mars. With Google Moon, you can see satellite images of the Moon, including information about the Apollo mission landing sites. You can zoom right into the highest resolution and see detailed images of the landing sites. Google Mars lets you see different views of the Red Planet, including elevation views and terrain, with detailed info on the various landing sites.

We've written many articles for Universe Today about how to use Google Maps. Here's an article about someone finding the Loch Ness monster on Google Maps, and here's an article about how you can land on the Moon in Google Earth.

We've also recorded an episode of Astronomy Cast all about the Earth. Listen here, Episode 51: Earth.

Filed under: Astronomy