Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Topographical Map of Earth Mission Completed

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the see-level dept.

dolphin558 writes "The mission to provide a topographical layout of a large swath of the planet Earth was completed after a four year partnership between NASA and NGA. The data was derived from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission launched February of 2000. The map extends from 60 degrees north of the Equator to 56 degrees south with a resolution level (for publicly available data) of 295 feet. The data can be used to set warning guidelines for low lying areas, regulate land use and further refine radar topography for extra-terrestrial applications as in the case of Venus."

2 of 20 comments (clear)

  1. Might help detecting mountains... by Shane-24 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...and preventing this

  2. This is cool by digitalchinky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Years ago (early 1990's) I used to use radar elevation data to do 'theoretical' plots of radar coverage (that sounds confusing, but it is correct) in mountainous areas across various parts of asia - For visualisation I used ARC/View running on some old unix machine, but then found that an American program.... * cough * oil * cough * stock * had better presentation methods. The latter program I loved, but development was dropped for some unknown reason.

    All this stuff can be found on the internet. It is neither new, nor difficult. Anyone can do it, even way back then, though the cost to 'purchase' the data was not cheap.