Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) Mission Overview

The first single pass SAR (synthetic aperture radar) interferometer in space has been flown after some delay on board the Space Shuttle in February 2000. The mission is called SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission). The mission objective was to acquire a radar data set during this 11 day mission which allows to generate a new consistent and more accurate global digital terrain model and topographic maps of all land surfaces between +60 and -56 latitudes and it has been successfully achieved.