WASHINGTON -- Elevation maps are plentiful for most of the U.S. and Western Europe, where they were collected the old-fashioned way over the years by surveyors hiking up mountains and taking measurements.
While you might think that 40 years of humans flying in space would give us a good sense of the most of the world's elevations by now, the gaps in coverage are huge, says Michael Kobrick, a project scientist for the shuttle mapping mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"If you look at the hand-held photos coming back from the astronauts, you have a gazillion pictures of the Nile Delta, but when you look at the Falklands, Central and South America, the Philippines, Malaysia and other areas, that whole equatorial area isn't very clear. It's always clouded over," he says.
Endeavour's crew can bring those areas into focus using a new kind of radar instrument that works night and day, and can see through clouds. The crew hopes to map about 70 to 80 percent of the Earth's land surface (depending on
With one instrument placed in Endeavour's cargo bay and the other mounted at the end of a 200-foot telescoping boom, the astronauts will be able to combine two images taken from slightly different angles to accurately calculate surface features and changes in elevation.
Back on Earth, that data can be used as an "overlay" on existing spy satellite photos to create a highly precise snapshot of nearly anywhere in the world. Computer software can take it a step further, creating a you-are-there sense of the site in what's called "virtual reality."
Commercially, the new maps that result from this mission may be used to increase the effectiveness of
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