Mapping the world in 3-D

Summary form only given. Remember when the world was flat? Not any more. In February, 2000 NASA, using six astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavor, spent 11 days gathering data for the first complete three-dimensional global map of the planet as part of the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. The 12 terabytes they collected will revolutionize knowledge of the Earth, and have applications in fields as disparate as geologic mapping and petroleum exploration, flight training and navigation, siting cell phone transmitters, water drainage modeling and disaster planning. The author describes how it was done!.