You Can Now Explore Mars With NASA's New Website

It's going to be another 15 years before man sets foot on Mars. 

At least, that's the projected timeline from NASA, who envisage putting a human on an asteroid by 2030. Until then, the new Mars Trek website will have to sate your Red Planet thirst.

Essentially a version of Google Earth for the fourth planet of our solar system, Mars Trek stitches together images and topography data collected by the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter. While perhaps not quite as relevant as hunting out the roof of your own Earth-based home, the Trek site does include bookmarks for all four of NASA's Mars rovers (Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity).

Even more brilliantly, you can view the surface in 3D, and anyone with a 3D printer (nope, we haven't got one either) can print sections of Mars' surface using data stored on the website.

Which means you can finally build that scale model of the Curiosity landing site you've been dreaming of...

Enjoy exploring the distant dusty surface right here. Give it a week, and we'll probably be writing about the alien colony some Reddit user claims to have found in the images.