Boarding now for Mars

Google is the latest Web site to offer detailed images of Mars for folks looking to get a closer look at the red planet. Google Mars dishes up three types of data that users can patch into, from color-coded elevation maps to thermal infrared maps to snapshots of the far-away planet. (For screen shots from Google Mars, click here.)

And then there's the mother of Mars Web sites, published by NASA. You can get the latest info on everything from the Mars rovers to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that entered the red planet's orbit last week.

With all the attention on Mars these days, it seems the moon may be getting lonelier by the minute.