All of the radar measurements used in making this movie were obtained from a NASA DC-8 aircraft (based at Moffett Field) flying at 33,000 feet! It took about 5 minutes to collect all the data in the data take, and about an hour on a Cray Superserver SMP/APP computer to process it.
The video was generated by using the TOPSAR-derived DEMs and brightness maps as input to the program Fly! (from PCI of Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada), which simulates flight over a synthetic surface. Fly! outputs a movie of a sample flight path in "j-movie" ("Parallax-JPEG") format. This was then converted to MPEG-1 using the "compressor" software of North Valley Research, Be averton, OR.
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