PASADENA, Calif. NASA unveiled dramatic new footage of Californias notorious San Andreas fault on Thursday to honor space shuttle crew members who captured the imagery during a recent mission to map the globe.

"Its a spectacular exploration of a major fault," said Mike Kobrick, the missions project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), of the video flyover of a 90-mile (144-kilometer) portion of the fault. Kobrick helped train the six-member crew for their mission.

The astronauts, who were visiting JPL, spent most of their recent 11-day mission using a complex radar device built by JPL to create the most detailed topographic map of the word ever produced. Thursdays visit was the crews first since their flight concluded on February 22.

The video, stills from which are reproduced here, is but a small sample of the products the mission will yield. NASA expects it will take at least two years to process all of the 330 tapes -- each containing the equivalent of a map of the whole of India -- recorded during the mission.

"When they get the full data set back, itll just be incredible," shuttle commander Kevin Kregel said.

The video gives viewers the illusion of flying along portions of the San Andreas and nearby Garlock faults near the Mojave Desert, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles. The images use shuttle topography data overlaid by color data from the Landsat 7 satellite. Vertical relief is exaggerated by 50 percent.

The San Andreas, the active boundary between the North American and Pacific plates, appears most clearly in the images, including portions that skirt the heavily traveled Golden State (Route 5) Freeway, as well as the desert city of Palmdale, California, where the shuttle was built.

The two plates slide past each other, forming what geologists call a strike-slip fault. Any movement along the fault, which extends through the state to north of San Francisco, can trigger enormous earthquakes.

Tom Farr, the deputy project scientist for the mission at JPL, said the data gives a new look at Earth.

"For scientists, sometimes getting a perspective like that allows you to really understand the lay of the land," Farr said.

For the more remote corners of the world, that may make all the difference.

"There were lots of regions of the world that had never even been mapped before," Kregel said.

The STS 99 crew -- minus Japanese astronaut Mamoru Mohri -- spent several hours at JPL, showing slides and video of their mission, and signing autographs.