Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Earth like never before

Re:Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Ear... by supernova87a on Friday February 26, 2021 @10:49PM (#26282419)

I would love to hear some perspective on this, but from my recollection one of the most significant early datasets ever released was about 20 years ago when I was in grad school -- I heard about this "Shuttle Radar Topography Mission" that was going to scan the entire Earth.

I remember it had a long extendible gantry (?) that was deployed out of the shuttle bay to give it more scanning baseline. I think it was done for the intelligence community (this being just post 9-11) but some part of it became public? I remember reading that the data was collected on tapes (!) that they had to swap hot to ensure continuity of the data.

Shortly after that, I noticed that Earth simulation flyby animations became almost common, planes started being equipped with simulated terrain maps for collision warning, etc. I imagine it was a revolution for a lot of industries.

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Re:Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Ear... by sstanie on Friday February 26, 2021 @11:20PM (#26282538)

The inspector-gadget arm sticking out of the space shuttle does look pretty funny https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/usgs-eros-archive-...

I don't think the arm was related to anything with intelligence- they just needed some way to have a second radar slightly moved away from the main one on the Shuttle. The further away it is, the more accurate they could measure elevation, so they stuck it way out on a pole.

But I think you're right that it's possibly one of the most widely used GIS datasets. Some applications obviously need finer resolution than 30 meters, and lidar is more accurate for the small areas that it can cover, but it's still cool that they could cover most of the globe at 30 meter resolution

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Re:Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Ear... by ci5er on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:21AM (#26283673)

THEY cover at 10m. You get the low-rez version. Better than the 90m before, so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth.

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Re:Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Ear... by walrus01 on Saturday February 27, 2021 @02:23AM (#26283321)

The ASTER GDEM data set covers most of the world and is more accurate than non-USA SRTM.

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Re:Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Ear... by tppiotrowski on Saturday February 27, 2021 @02:52AM (#26283401)

Initially only 90 meter resolution was made public and some time later 30 meter resolution was available. I think maybe even higher resolution is still classified but can’t remember.

Was shocked we still use 20 year old elevation data extensively.

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Re:Fleets of radar satellites are measuring movements on Ear... by bradneuberg on Friday February 26, 2021 @11:22PM (#26282550)

I work on machine learning on remote sensing imagery, and the Shuttle derived Shuttle Radar Topography maps remain an important freely available Digital Elevation Map (DEM) source.

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