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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.

5 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Contact your congresscritter by Zalgon+26+McGee · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Yet another reason to contact your congressman: ensure they vote for NASA appropriations.

    They aren't perfect, and more support for private enterprise in space is needed, but NASA is worthy of support.

    --

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    Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman

  2. Better link by DESADE · · Score: 4, Informative

    here

  3. 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.

  4. They did better with Mars by alewando · · Score: 4, Offtopic

    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.

    1. Re:They did better with Mars by leeward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Umm... I designed and built some of the hardware for SIR-C (and also SRTM). There was absolutely no military connection to SIR-C. And X-SAR was built by the European space agencies, primarily the Italians on the antenna, and the Germans on the digital hardware, and they also had no military connection. The US military only got involved in SRTM after they saw how well the SIR-C radar worked, and after some of the SIR-C folks went looking for money to upgrade SIR-C to SRTM.

      SIR-C did not make topographic maps, except for one or two special tests using a technique called "repeat pass interferometry", because it did not have the outboard antenna on the 60M mast that SRTM had, and which gave SRTM its "stereo vision". And SIR-C only imaged a few small strips of the earth, each specifically requested by a scientist for some research purpose, or of course a few strips taken for PR purposes. SIR-C did not attempt to make a global map. This data is in the hands of the scientists involved, who supposedly continue to turn out papers based on the data. Also, SIR-C was conceived as a technology test experiment (and is also referred to as SRL - Space Radar Laboratory), used to test a variety of new radar technologies to see how well they worked from a spacebased platform.