Shuttle Imaging Radar A (SIR-A) Earth Surface Imagery

This data set contains earth images acquired by the Shuttle Imaging
Radar (SIR-A) which flew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia in November
1981 (STS-2). The SIR-A instrument operated for a total of almost 8
hours during the 2 and 1/2 day flight. The imagery produced from this
instrument is very useful for a variety of topographic and geologic
analyses.

SIR-A is a horizontally polarized L-band radar operating at 1.28 GHz
(23 cm). The SIR-A obtained imagery at a resolution of 40m with a
swath width of 50km and a look angle of approx. 45 degrees (variable).
The imagery is produced at a scale of 1:500,000. This data set
contains several independent data takes which provide coverage over
several areas including southern North America, southern Asia and
Europe, Australia and the Pacific islands, north Africa and northern
South America. A map of the coverage is available from NSSDC as part
of the data description packet.

The data are available on a variety of media from NSSDC. Related data
sets which may be of interest include the Shuttle Imaging Radar-B
(SIR-B) which flew onboard the space shuttle in 1984 and Synthetic
Aperture Radar (SAR) data from the Seasat satellite, and data from
SIR-C/X-SAR which flew on the Space Shuttle in April 1994.