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PIA03364: Colored Height and Shaded Relief, Central America

 Target Name:  Earth Is a satellite of:  Sol (our sun)

 Mission:  Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM)  Spacecraft:  Space Shuttle Endeavour Instrument:  CBand Interferometric Radar 

 Product Size:  9600 x 9000 pixels (w x h)  Produced By:  JPL  FullRes TIFF:  PIA03364.tif (84.57 MB) FullRes JPEG:  PIA03364.jpg (8.603 MB)  

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, southern Mexico and parts of Cuba and Jamaicaare all seen in this image from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. The dominant feature of the northern part of CentralAmerica is the Sierra Madre Range, spreading east from Mexico between the narrow Pacific coastal plain and the limestonelowland of the Yucatan Peninsula. Parallel hill ranges sweep across Honduras and extend south, past the Caribbean MosquitoCoast to lakes Managua and Nicaragua. The Cordillera Central rises to the south, gradually descending to Lake Gatun and theIsthmus of Panama. A highly active volcanic belt runs along the Pacific seaboard from Mexico to Costa Rica.

Highquality satellite imagery of Central America has, until now, been difficult to obtain due to persistent cloud cover in this regionof the world. The ability of SRTM to penetrate clouds and make threedimensional measurements has allowed the generation ofthe first complete highresolution topographic map of the entire region. This map was used to generate the image.

Two visualization methods were combined to produce the image: shading and color coding of topographic height. The shadeimage was derived by computing topographic slope in the northsouth direction. Color coding is directly related to topographicheight, with green at the lower elevations, rising through yellow, red, and magenta, to white at the highest elevations.

For an annotated version of this image, please select Figure 1, below:

(Large image: ~9 mB jpeg)

Elevation data used in this image were acquired by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour,launched on February 11, 2000. The mission used the same radar instrument that comprised the Spaceborne Imaging RadarC/XBand Synthetic Aperture Radar that flew twice on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994. The Shuttle Radar TopographyMission was designed to collect threedimensional measurements of the Earth's surface. To collect the 3D data, engineersadded a 60meter (200foot)long mast, installed additional Cband and Xband antennas, and improved tracking and navigationdevices. The mission is a cooperative project between NASA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency of the U.S. Departmentof Defense, and the German and Italian space agencies. It is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,for NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, Washington, D.C.

Size: 1720 by 1670 kilometers (1068 by 1036 miles)Location: 14.5 degrees North latitude, 85.0 degrees West longitude Orientation: North toward the top Image Data: Shaded and colored SRTM elevation model

Site Manager: Sue LavoieWebmaster: Karen BoggsCL#971196

Date Acquired: February 2000

Image Credit:NASA/JPL/NIMA

Image Addition Date:20021022

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