Most Complete Topographical Map of Earth Complete 207
An anonymous reader writes "Kudos to NASA and the Japanese trade ministry for mapping 99% of the Earth's surface, surpassing their previous effort, with which the new data will be amalgamated. Apparently, the data will be free to download and use."
Re:The other %1? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Free? How do they do the math? (Score:5, Insightful)
They break even by people finding profitable uses for it, which then produce tax revenue. Remember, the agencies doing this are US and Japanese government agencies.
Re:The other %1? (Score:1, Insightful)
Do they also measure surface area in linear distance units?
Remarkable domestic news coverage (Score:3, Insightful)
Did anybody else notice that the report of a newsworthy task by U.S. and Japanese agencies was reported by the BBC? Not ABC, NBC, CNN, or any other U.S. based news agency and certainly not by a Japan based agency. It's coverage like this that keeps me going back to the BBC.
Hiking, etc... (Score:3, Insightful)
This will (well, could) be great for geek hikers like myself; I find the topographical maps available okay, but don't really give one an accurate feel for the lay of the land. Incorporating this map into GPS (or, in the shorter term, some open source mapping software on a PDA-sized device) will be very cool...
Sigh, one of these days I hope to look at the beautiful surroundings nature provides, more than I look at my gadgets I bring with me :) Oh well, navigating/mapping is half the fun of exploring, to me (whether in a car, boat, or on foot).
Re:Technically free, but not in practice (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm okay with that. The raw data is free, but generally useless to the average person without some interpretation.
The only thing stopping someone from making a free alternative to those commercial services is lack of cartography skills.
Free is important - think of the grad students! (Score:5, Insightful)
I am actually using this data for my thesis project in geology. Actually, I'm really excited to learn about this, as the previously available 90m resolution SRTM data isn't really sufficient for my needs.
The SRTM data is all free to download, if you can figure out their poor interface for selecting the files you need. If it wasn't, there would be a lot fewer people working with it. It is the most important data for the analyses I'm doing, and without it my thesis would be a lot different (you can do similar things with regular topographic maps, but essentially only by making hand measurements). I'm really glad that I haven't done a ton of analyses using the SRTM data - now I will wait until I can get my hands on the new stuff.
For a grad student like me with little to no funding for my research and a tiny paycheck from working as a TA, even a nominal fee to download is prohibitive. Even for someone that DOES have funding, paying for stuff like this is extremely annoying. Despite what journal publishers want you to think, science is about openness and sharing of information. Most scientists freely share their data and work with others - even those that work with proprietary data in industry, if you ask them nicely.
And as others have noted - we already paid for it. It's produced by the government.
Now, here's the best part - there is actually 30m data from the SRTM mission. However, except for North America, only the 90m data is available, because it's restricted - not by NASA, but by the DOD. So with this new data they've apparently side-stepped the DOD. NASA and the USGS do seem like they want to get their data out their and accessible by scientists, despite what the DOD may want. I am working on Thailand, so the 30m SRTM data was restricted, but now I should be able to get this new data at the same resolution.
Re:Technically free, but not in practice (Score:3, Insightful)
The previous SRTM data is available completely free to the end-user. I downloaded several gigabytes of it for use in my thesis.
There are commercial vendors who will provide you somewhat better versions of it - with the holes filled, and the individual tiles stitched together. But for someone actually working with the data, that's not really worth much because you can do it yourself in a few minutes.
I'm trying to get the new data right now - I'm still working on my thesis and this will be really great stuff - and it appears it's pretty much the same set-up as before.
Basically, there's no need for cynicism. The people at NASA, USGS, and other government science agencies really do want their data to be free and accessible by anyone.
Re:The other %1? (Score:2, Insightful)
"or is it part of a top secret organization?"
My guess, most unmapped terrain is not secret. WHy? Because 1% of the surface of the earth is absolutely huge. THe surface area of earth is 510.072.000 km. 1% would be 5.100.720 km, which is 2258x2258 km. Such a large area can't be secret in its entirety.
What if the 1% is not continuous space?