How To Map The Earth (or What Was The Shuttle For Anyway)
How to Map the Earth (or what was the shuttle for) was the title of an excellent talk to the IET in Southern California by Dr Kobrick, a scientist from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The first manned mission for the space shuttle, and it’s second flight overall, STS-2 had a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) loaded in the payload bay to capture images of earth. To create a SAR image, signal processing of the echoes of the pulses transmitted by the single beam forming antenna is combined with the position of shuttle in orbiting to allow the generation of topographic information. Since a synthetic aperture radar captures detail by moving over the target it is possible to get a higher level of resolution compared to a beam scanning radar and as the wavelengths are not blocked by clouds…