Welcome to Google Mars

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California Republic -- A careless remark by Kahuna about the inevitability of Google Mars as reported in UQ21 has come back to haunt Him. It seems that massive clowns at Google have been up to no good.

A visit to Google Labs this morning revealed the sordid existence of Google Mars in collaboration with NASA and the University of Arizona. The capability to view this in the Google Earth viewer is also in the pipeline ("Not yet, but we're working on it.")

While on the subject of Google Earth, the new Release 4 Beta has disturbing integration with the new Picasa Beta (not publicly available) that unleashes much anticipated web album support. It is now possible to geotag Picasa images using Google Earth. Double-clicking the longitude or latitude in Picasa then fires up Google Maps to provide information on how to get there. Of course, the geoencoding process also generates the necessary KML to update My Places in Goole Earth, along with a copy of the Picasa image.

Commercial air traffic can also be tracked in realtime on Google Earth in collaboration with fboweb.com. Click here to track inbound and outbound flights at major US airports. The altitude and airspeed of each aircraft is displayed in Google Earth. This is highly disturbing functionality. Proceed with caution.

Microsoft evangelist Professor Gordon was not available for comment.