HOUSTON While the successful Hubble repair mission will allow rare glimpses of the universe, the next shuttle mission will yield useful images of our home planet, Earth.
The 11-day Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) should produce the most complete terrain map of the world, with at least 80 percent of the planet covered. It will also produce 3-D images that will be useful to firemen, cellular phone users and ecologists.
Shuttle managers are reviewing a launch date, set for mid-January after delays canceled an October flight. The mission will likely fly late January or February. Space Shuttle Endeavour rolled out to Kennedy Space Centers Pad 39A on December 13.
Endeavours crew consists of commander Kevin Kregel, pilot Dom Gorie and mission specialists Janet Kavandi and Janice Voss of NASA, Mamoru Mohri of the National Space Development Agency of Japan and Gerhard Thiele of the European Space Agency.
NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the project in conjunction with the U.S. Defense Department and the Italian and German space agencies.
The crew will activate the payload and extend the mast once in orbit along with monitoring the radar system.
The payload consists of three antennas and an electronics package in the shuttles payload bay. The main antenna sits in the payload bay while the other two are at the end of a 200-foot mast extended once the shuttle is in orbit.
The plastic and aluminum mast is also the longest rigid structure ever flown in space.
The radar apparatus acquires data in 225-kilometer swaths of the Earth's land surface between 60 degrees north and 56 degrees south latitude. The data will then be processed into a digital topographic map that will take one year to develop.
SRTM uses radar interferometry, which are two images taken from slightly different locations. Differences between these images allow for the calculation of surface elevation.
An antenna in the shuttle payload bay and a second radar antenna attached to the end of the mast are used to produce the two different images.
The data will also be used to generate 3-D images scientists will use for studies of flooding, erosion, landslide hazards, earthquakes, ecological zones, weather forecasts, and climate change.
The data's military applications include mission planning and rehearsal, modeling and simulation. Other possible uses include optimizing locations for cellular phone towers and improving topographic maps for backpackers, firefighters, and geologists.
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