Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Data

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.

Comments

They did better with Mars

[alewando]

It's odd that NASA is only now getting around to do with the Earth what they've been doing with Mars for years. (Follow that link for the pretty pictures, if nothing else.

From 1998 to 1999, the Mars Global Surveyor made some 27 million topographical measurements of the red planet. With an average accuracy of 13 meters and sometimes as good as 2 meters. That's not much more than my height.

Of course, having that precision on Earth would be more difficult with our thicker atmosphere and would raise profound privacy issues. On the other hand, government spy satellites probably routinely attain that precision without anyone's batting an eyelash. Maybe it's just as well that a civilian agency get in on the action too.

Re:Minnseota Internet Slowdown (please mod up)

[MarkMac]

Yes, there are problems related to the Code Red Worm - your friends in Minneapolis with Quest DSL are probably using a DSL modem that is affected - the main symptom is being disconnected. There is a fix listed for certain CISCO modems - have a look at:

http://support.visi.com/dsl/codered.html

Of course this doesn't have much to do with NASA's shuttle radar imagery! Except maybe that it can take a while to download one of those full resolution images for maximum viewing :-)

I'd point out that some of the imagery is too good - extremely sharp topographic relief simply cannot be captured in stereo from space (at least not in the shuttle passes) and thus no elevation data for those locations. I also recall that they were not able to image the entire surface of the Earth in stereo as they had hoped.