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Three million satellite snaps now free for all

NASA and Japan loose images captured by ASTER cam on Terra earth observation sat

NASA and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have announced that all Earth imaging data from the ASTER instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft are now free-as-in-beer.

ASTER – the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Radiation radiometer – was Japan's contribution to the instruments aboard Terra, and it's been collecting images since late 1999.

Until the latest announcement, METI had made ASTER's digital topographic maps available for free, but still charged what NASA describes as a “nominal fee” for all other data.

As well as land elevation – the topographic maps – ASTER creates detailed maps of land surface temperature and reflectance. While it doesn't cover the whole Earth (its view is from 83° North to 83° South), it has 99 per cent of what's left, in resolution between 15 and 90 metres (50 to 300 feet).

Terra is an example of a satellite far outliving expectations. When it was launched in 1999, it had a design life of five years.

ASTER's 16-year database comprises nearly three million individual scenes.

NASA says applications for ASTER data “monitoring glacial advances and retreats, monitoring potentially active volcanoes, identifying crop stress, determining cloud morphology and physical properties, evaluating wetlands, monitoring thermal pollution, monitoring coral reef degradation, mapping surface temperatures of soils and geology, and measuring surface heat balance”.

The files can be accessed here or here. ®

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