NASA World wind SRTM:
NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is an international project of NASA integrated with NGA. NASA has provided SRTM data sets for Australia and Pacific islands. Already there are data sets for United States. SRTM contains high resolution data bases of earth.
SRTM uses two types of Imaging Radars c band radar and X band radar. World wind combines the images of Land sat satellite with SRTM images to experience a rich view of Earth. You can go to any place in the world virtually and view the locations. SRTM provides wealthy terrain data.
The global topographic maps are provided by C band imagery radar. X band radar helps to give high resolution data. But x band will not cover the global data provided by c band radar. The X band radar data sets are processed in German laboratory.
The shuttle radar topography mission gathers 3 dimensional views of all land surfaces in earth. It contains data sets of shaded relief for the surfaces in omen. The color given in these data sets are bright and have high resolution. The color ranges from green to low elevation and brown to high elevation. The Arabian Sea is colored in blue.SRTM also provides perspective view of antelope valley in California. Here both x band radar and c band radar are used to provide images. It integrates with Land sat to provide infra red views of the earth. SRTM also contains Radar image of Los Angeles. It also includes Pacific Ocean in one side and Los Angeles in center. The image combines two types of data sets in SRTM. The images have bright color that relates to the strength ness of the radar.
SRTM also contains the anaglyph view of volcanically active places. Red or blue glasses are essential to view these images so that it will give the real 3 dimensional effects. SRTM here creates two perspective view of a single image. Anaglyph glasses used here covers left eye with red filter and right eye with blue filter.
SRTM finished version is available for all users now. UGCS Eros data center makes the SRTM data sets available to users after passing agreement with NASA. You can obtain both finished and unfinished data sets of SRTM here.
SRTM has well defined radar system that fly on board o space on 11-day mission. It takes 40 % of earth’s surface in photographs. Though they are powerful systems, they can not go deep into cloud coverage areas. Due to cloud cover the remaining important earth’s surface have not been take as photographic images. But the radar system takes the 40 % surface accurately.
SRTM data sets have many applications. The finished data sets of SRTM are being used by military, civil and scientific communities. Projects like flood control, volcanic monitoring, earthquake research etc can use the SRTM data sets well.The data sets can be powerfully used in water drainage locations, cell towers etc. It also uses some new technology where the two radars will take the image from slightly different locations.Technorati Tags: NASA, NASA world wind, using world wind, features of world wind,
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