CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Endeavour's international crew will assemble the most comprehensive topographical map ever made of Earth's surface. And in doing so, they'll be gathering data that is expected to play a key role in developing collision-avoidance systems for both military and civilian aircraft.
"We're looking at getting a better three-dimensional database for airplanes so that no airplane ever has to run into another mountain," said Endeavour mission commander Kevin Kregel.
"I don't know if you remember Ron Brown's situation, but that's what happened," added Thomas Farr, deputy project scientist for the so-called Space Radar Topographical Mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
On April 3, 1996, an Air Force T 43 aircraft carrying U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others on a trade mission smashed into a mountainside near Croatia's Dubrovnik airport. Dense cloud cover, rain and thick fog rolling in from the Adriatic Sea apparently blanketed the surrounding terrain as the plane slammed into the mountain at 150 knots, killing all aboard.
Shuttle Endeavour's astronauts will have a hand in making certain similar tragedies are avoided in the future.
"They basically flew into the side of a mountain that they didn't know was there. And if they had had this kind of [collision-avoidance] system, they would have known the mountain was there and known exactly where they needed to steer the plane," said Farr, himself a licensed pilot. "I fly a lot and I really like that idea."
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