NASA announced on April 1, 2016 (not April Fools Trick) that all Earth imagery from a prolific Japanese remote sensing instrument operating aboard the NASA Terra spacecraft since late 1999 is now available to users everywhere at no cost. The public will have unlimited access to the complete 16-plus-year database for the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument, which images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet. The ASTER database currently consists of more than 2.95 million individual scenes.
The content ranges from massive scars across the Oklahoma landscape from an EF-5 tornado and the devastating aftermath of flooding in Pakistan, to volcanic eruptions in Iceland and wildfires in California. Previously, users could access the ASTER global digital topographic maps of Earth online at no cost, but paid METI a nominal fee to order other ASTER data products. In announcing the change in policy, METI and NASA cited ASTER longevity and continued strong environmental monitoring capabilities.
Launched in 1999, ASTER has far exceeded its five-year design life and will continue to operate for the foreseeable future as part of the suite of five Earth-observing instruments on Terra. We anticipate a dramatic increase in the number of users of our data, with new and exciting results to come, said Michael Abrams, ASTER science team leader at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, home to the ASTER U.S. science team. ASTER data are processed into products using algorithms developed at JPL and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. A joint U.S. - Japan science team validates and calibrates the instrument and data products. Read on for access ...
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