Is the neverland ranch visible from google maps?
One of the top stories yesterday was how NASA and Japan have released the data from their ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) satellite on the Internet – for free. What is significant about this is that the data covers 99% of the entire Earth’s landmass terrain – verses 80% from the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) – which was the best previously available free public terrain data. ASTER’s data is also higher resolution than SRTM which had a base resolution of 90m and at best 30m. ASTER’s resolution has a base resolution of 30m, and can be higher under certain conditions (up to 7-10m – see documentation). The data released comes from over 1.3 million photos taken by the Aster satellite. So, will Google Earth make use of this new ASTER data? The answer is: only a portion of the data. Google Earth already has terrain data in many areas that has higher resolution than the data provided by Aster (see below). However, ASTER provides data for remote
