Alan Buis (818) 354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Gretchen Cook-Anderson (202) 358-0836
NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Howard Cohen (301) 227-3105
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Bethesda, Md.
News Release: 2005-004
Jan. 6, 2005
NASA Goes Down Under for Shuttle Mapping Mission Finale
Culminating more than four years of processing data, NASA and the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have completed Earth's most extensive global
topographic
map.
The data, extensive enough to fill the U.S. Library of Congress, were gathered
during the
Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, which flew in February 2000 on the Space
Shuttle
Endeavour.
The digital elevation maps encompass 80 percent of Earth's landmass. They
reveal for the
first time large, detailed swaths of Earth's topography previously obscured by
persistent
cloudiness. The data will benefit scientists, engineers, government agencies
and the
public with an ever-growing array of uses.
This is among the most significant science missions the Shuttle has ever
performed, and
it's probably the most significant mapping mission of any single type ever,
said Dr.
Michael Kobrick, mission project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena,
Calif.
The final data release covers Australia and New Zealand in unprecedented
uniform detail.
It also covers more than 1,000 islands comprising much of Polynesia and
Melanesia in the
South Pacific, as well as islands in the South Indian and Atlantic oceans.
Many of these islands have never had their topography mapped, Kobrick said.
Their low
topography makes them vulnerable to tidal effects, storm surges and long-term
sea level
rise. Knowing exactly where rising waters will go is vital to mitigating the
effects of
future disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission are being used for applications
ranging
from land use planning to virtual Earth exploration. Future missions using
similar
technology could monitor changes in Earth's topography over time, and even map
the
topography of other planets, said Dr. John LaBrecque, manager of NASA's Solid
Earth and
Natural Hazards Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
The missions radar system mapped Earth from 56 degrees south to 60 degrees
north of the
equator. The resolution of the publicly available data is three arc-seconds
(1/1,200th of
a degree of latitude and longitude, about 295 feet, at Earth's equator). The
mission is a
collaboration among NASA, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the
German and
Italian space agencies. The missions role in space history was honored with a
display of
the mission's canister and mast antenna at the Smithsonian Institution's
Udvar-Hazy
Center, Chantilly, Va.
To view a selection of new images from the Shuttle Radar Topography Missions
latest data
set on the Internet, visit http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/SRTM .
To view a new fly-over animation of New Zealand on the Internet, visit
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ .
To learn more about this mission, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm . For an
interactive multimedia geography quiz using data from the mission, visit
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/srtm/ .
For information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov .
-end-
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