NASA 3D Earth Mapping

lunartik sends us this link, regarding NASA's efforts to produce a high-resolution radar map of the Earth.

FOI?

[penguinicide]

I wonder what rational will support the prevention of retrevial of the maps through the Freedom of Information Act? National Security? (they are planning on releasing the hires image of the US)

NASA Earth 3-d mapping

[space-dfd]

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mapping Mission is a joint U.S.-German project. On board are two radar systems SIR-C (american) and X-SAR (german)that have been flown in earlier missions in 1994. Primary goal of the recent mission is the generation of a digital elevation model of the earths surface in between +/- 60 degrees latitude. Data will be processed both at the German Aerospace Center DLR and at NASA JPL, and first results are being displayed at their Web-sites www.nasa-jpl.gov/srtm and www.dfd.dlr.de/srtm As for the German site we have roughly 1 million accesses per day, mainly from U.S. users. This has put an unexspeced load to our configuration. So we recently agreed upon with JPL, that they will mirror our entire site on their server. This will hopefully improve download times. The entire data amount of the mission will be roughly 3 Terabyte for the X-SAR and more than 6 TByte for the SIR-C. There will be full exchange of data between both partners. The data catalog will be accessible through eoweb.dlr.de once the data have been processed. The pixel size is exspected to be 30m and the relative height resolution to be 6m (X-SAR) and 10m (SIR-C)

Official site

[ch2]

The first images from this are here [nasa.gov].

May have to stop at 70% though

[iang]

According to this article [bbc.co.uk] on the BBC News web site [bbc.co.uk] there's a problem with the mast supporting the radar equipment: a stabilising thruster has stopped working.

They've already mapped 17 million square miles, but may have to stop short at 70% because of the failure of this thruster. They've been able to keep making measurements, compensating for the thruster's failure by firing the shuttle's own boosters. But it doesn't have enough fuel on board to carry on doing this for the rest of the mission.