A collaborative effort between the U.S. space agency NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, known as METI, has produced the most complete topographic map of Earth, covering 99 percent of the planet’s surface.

The new map was created from 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images taken from NASA’s Terra spacecraft. Thanks to the cutting-edge technology of the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or Aster, instrument located on Terra.

Aster, one of five Earth-observing instruments on Terra, takes images with spatial resolutions from 50 to 300 feet. It has the ability to get images from the visible up to the thermal infrared wavelength.

The images, freely downloadable from the Internet, will be especially valuable for scientific studies because it features digital data on elevations. The data in the map can provide detailed geographical information to researchers from a wide range of disciplines such as firefighting, conservation of natural resources, or urban planning, among others.

‘NASA and METI contribute the Aster topographic data to the Group on Earth Observations, an international partnership headquartered at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, for use in its Global Earth Observation System of Systems.’

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Via NASA JPL