"Ten years ago, in February 2000, NASA mapped the entire world in
eleven days. It's true: the mission was called the Shuttle Radar
Topography Mission (SRTM), and over the course of eleven days, it used
a big radar attached to the space shuttle to get elevation data from
the vast majority of solid Earth; practically all land between 60
degrees North and 56 degrees South was included, with a resolution of
30 meters (90 feet). Over 9 terabytes of data were captured. It then
took two years to process that data and make it usable (and it is
still being refined to this day). This data is freely available to
anyone, and the number of possible applications is almost infinite.
It's been used in GIS, cartography, environmental planning, weather
modeling (weather patterns are enormously influenced by the
topography), flight simulators, Google Earth, and the list goes on. In
this short article, I would like to give you a quick tour of the kinds
of things this data can reveal. My hope is to get you thinking about
what else could be done with this incredible resource."
>From slashdot article:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/01/03/199219/Ideas-For-Exploiting-NASAs-SRTM-DataOfficial NASA Site:
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Radar_Topography_MissionPaper: Farr, T. G., et al. (2007), The Shuttle Radar Topography
Mission, Rev. Geophys., 45, RG2004, doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2005RG000183.
-Glen
http://zzzoot.blogspot.com/--
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