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ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the other-applications dept.

phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."

6 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. SAR by stoolpigeon · · Score: 4, Informative

    Synthetic Aperture Radar

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    It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
  2. Re:Visualization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://www.opendx.org/

  3. Re:Visualization by PeterBrett · · Score: 2, Informative

    R?

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    Pirate Party UK
  4. Re:Visualization by jd · · Score: 2, Informative

    OpenDX is good. is also popular, leading to some nice packages like MayaVi2. ChomboVis is no longer under development but may also prove useful. GGobi is another very nice toolkit. For a more mathematical visualization, there's also always Octave.

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    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  5. ESA has been doing this for years by reddish · · Score: 4, Informative

    ESA has been sponsoring FOSS projects for years; I worked on the GPL'ed BEAT software no less than seven years ago that was commissioned by ESA (disclosure: I am no longer with the company that develops it).

    See here for more examples of open source software funded by ESA. They are really ahead of the pack in this respect.

  6. Re:In English? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    They are all Earth observing satellites using Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR). Satellite sends down a radar pulse, picks up the backscattered returns and processes it into an image. From there analysis can tell you a bunch of things: you can monitor sea ice, detect oil slicks, find ships, monitor vegetation, etc. For a lot of applications SAR is excellent because the pulses go right through clouds and you do not need solar illumination to be able to see.