You will now be able to fly to the red planet and get its 3-D views via internet. It sounds incredible, but it is true. Yes, Google and NASA have teamed up to offer virtual tours of Mars to the global web users.

On Tuesday, Google and NASA announced that they will soon release a new Mars mode in Google Earth that will offer the virtual tours of the red planet. The new Mars mode, Google Mars 3D will help the web users and researchers understand the red planet more. It will offer the means of data sharing to the researchers.

Using the Google Mars 3D, the users will be able to enjoy flying through Mars’ gaping canyons and soaring mountains and getting fantastic views from Mars rovers. The users will be able to view satellite images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The new Mars mode will help the users learn more about NASA's exploration of the planet and its new discoveries, view its photo archives, get 3-D views of Mars, and share the information with other users.

Google Mars 3D is the result of the NASA, Google collaboration agreement inked in November 2006. Under the Space Act Agreement, Google assented to make NASA's data public. The major contributors to the project include NASA's Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon University, and SETI.

Google probably decided to bring out a new Mars mode in Google Earth, seeing the public interest in Mars that increased after the Phoenix Mars Lander.

Noel Gorelick, the project leader, said, “Much of the imagery used in Google Mars 3-D is already publicly available and easy to access on sites across the Internet, but the value of the new tool is that it gets the data together in the same place and at the same time in an easy-to-use package.”