Boeing To Process Radar Space Radar Data For NIMA

SPACEWAR

An SRTM image of the LA basin

St. Louis - Oct 09, 2003
Boeing has received $9.2 million in follow-on orders from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) to produce a digital topographic model of the Earth from radar data collected by the space shuttle Endeavour.

This award to Boeing under NIMA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) program brings the total contract award to over $19 million. Boeing is one of two prime contractors involved in the SRTM program, and is responsible for the overall project management of its team and development of the interactive editing system interface and editing software that is being used to produce the data at Boeing.

To date, the team has produced over 3,000 cells of radar data over portions of four continents with each cell being one degree of latitude by one degree of longitude in size. Boeing's SoftPlotter�, a software program that processes terrain data derived from aerial and satellite imagery, is the production foundation for the software developed and in use by the Boeing team.

"The development of a worldwide terrain elevation database from SRTM data represents the first single, accurate and time synchronous source of worldwide survey data," said John Werle, general manager of Boeing's Space and Intelligence Systems Washington Operations.

"This data is being made available to the public and will no doubt generate many innovative and as yet undefined capabilities that will change our lives. We are honored to be a key player in this effort and are committed to the future of geospatial technologies and the development of a highly accurate digital model of the earth."

The SRTM mission flew on NASA's space shuttle Endeavour in February 2000. The data collected are the most detailed and accurate height measurements ever gathered for this large an area. The goal of the SRTM production system is to produce digital topographic data for 80% of the Earth's land surface. Automation of most tasks has reduced editing time and minimized production costs, as compared to previous systems for producing similar data.

EARTH OBSERVATION

NASA's Timed Mission Extended

Laurel - Oct 02, 2003
NASA has extended the TIMED (Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere, Energetics and Dynamics) mission for another three years of operations and data analysis beginning in January 2004 with an additional year of data analysis to be conducted after orbital operations are completed.

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