NASA Satellite Maps 99% of Earth’s Topography

2009 June 29

by Alexis Madrigal

The elevation of nearly every place on Earth is now available, thanks to a NASA satellite mission.

By analyzing 1.3 million images collected by a Japanese instrument aboard the spacecraft, the agency created a topographic map covering 99 percent of the globe in a giant grid of measurements. Each point is spaced 98 feet apart.

“This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world,” said Woody Turner, a NASA scientist who worked on the project, in a press release. “This unique global set of data will serve users and researchers from a wide array of disciplines that need elevation and terrain information.”

The map is available as a 26-megabyte TIF or you can download the data yourself from NASA. It’s a big improvement on the previous best topographic map publicly available, which was produced by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, and surveyed 80 percent of the world.

The Obama administration has told NASA it would like to see more earth science, in addition to standard planetary exploration and astrophysics. In its latest budget, the agency requested $1.2 billion more for studying our own planet [pdf] than it had previously projected. The changes reflect the “significant commitment to Earth Science on the part of the new Administration.”

The agency currently has 15 satellites monitoring the globe and pumping out ever higher-resolution data about the processes that drive global change. One significant loss of the Earth Science program was the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which was supposed to deliver key data for studying climate change. Its launch failed in February, resulting in the destruction of the satellite.

The elevation data can be combined with other information that NASA gathers to create stunning renderings of terrain, like the one of Death Valley pictured below.