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Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Data

Posted by michael on from the land-navigation-made-easy dept.

SubtleNuance writes: "This story on Canada.com describes the mission and results of NASA's recent flight to map Earth. The Shuttle trip has provided the most detailed 3D photos of Earth ever released." Some of the images are just astounding. Too bad most of the data isn't available yet.

4 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Resolution? just a note by onepoint · · Score: 2, Interesting

    on the page http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/datatimeline.html
    you'll see the resolution stats from 30m to 1 km

    and a side note
    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/datacoverage.html Nasa states "Land area missed: 50,000 km2 (all in US)"

    ONEPOINT

    --
    if you see me, smile and say hello.
  2. Half empty glasses by Argy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    > Too bad most of the data isn't available yet.

    Is there a rule for Slashdot editors that their comments about good news have to be counter-balancingly negative?

    Considering that pilots and guided missiles may make life-and-death decisions based on this data, taking time to make sure it's accurate and properly processed seems like a good idea. If you have an urgent need, I suppose you could ask for 15,000 CDs of raw data, but all the crunched data should be available by the end of 2002.

  3. Re:Amazing! by NullPointer · · Score: 2, Interesting

    With maps like this you could do some very very real full scale simulations of war.

    Actually, DOD did just that when US troops were sent to Bosnia. I was working on the commercial development of IFSAR at the time and got to see some of the results. The AirForce did some pretty cool virtual terrain demos for bomb-run training. Looks like TEC still has some images out there: http://www.tec.army.mil/ctis/ctis_tec/ifsare.html

    --
    NULL
  4. Re:Waaaaaiiiiiiittttttt........ by Veritan+Drelor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Speaking of NASA and Canada... A couple of years ago, NASA refused to launch a Canadian firm's imaging satellite specifically because it was more advanced than its American counterparts (no insult intended). As I recall, they negotiated with the Chinese to get the thing into orbit...... Oh, and on another note, resolutions better than 1 m are definitely out there. Whatever images have been released, I imagine an order of magnitude superior resolution has been achieved, but that the technology is kept secret.