SPACEPHOTOS

Much of Honshu, Japan's largest island, is seen in this image generated from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data. The nation of Japan is made up of four main islands and several smaller ones. Together they comprise a total land area of 374,744 square kilometers (144,689 square miles), slightly less than the area of California. Forests and woodlands cover 67 percent of Japan's mostly rugged and mountainous terrain. In this image, elevations are represented by color, height increases from white to green to brown. Tokyo, the capital city, is the bright area in the bottom right part of the image. Of Japan's 127 million people, almost 80 percent live on Honshu, mostly in the flat coastal areas. The mountain peak visible to the left of Tokyo is Mt. Fuji, a stratovolcano famous for its perfectly shaped cone. This image was created during preliminary processing of a single data swath and contains numerous data gaps shown in red. These gaps will be filled in with data from overlapping swaths when the final elevation maps are produced.The elevation data used in this image was acquired by SRTM aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, launched on February 11, 2000. SRTM used the same radar instrument that comprised the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) that flew twice on Endeavour in 1994. SRTM was designed to collect three-dimensional measurements of Earth's land surface. To collect the 3-D SRTM data, engineers added a mast 60 meters (about 200 feet) long, installed additional C-band and X-band antennas, and improved tracking and navigation devices.