NASA Instrument Offers Fly-Around View of Mt. St. Helens

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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VIDEO ADVISORY

See Mount St. Helens from the “zoom lens” of NASA’s Terra
satellite. Airing today on NASA Television, this short animated
fly-around shows the volcano as it appears now — more than 20
years after the eruption that killed 57 people, blew off the top
of the mountain, destroyed miles of surrounding forest and left a
massive, scarred crater behind. The animation was created with
data from NASA’s Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and
Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument.

The animation will air on the video file segment of NASA TV
today, Thursday, December 28, which normally airs at 9 a.m.,
noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. For up-to-date
NASA TV schedule information, see:

ftp://ftp.hq.nasa.gov/pub/pao/tv-advisory/nasa-tv.txt

The animation is also available online at:

For more information about ASTER and the availability of
data from the instrument, see:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2000/terra.html

Built in Japan for the Ministry of International Trade and
Industry, ASTER is one of several Earth-observing instruments on
the Terra satellite, launched in December 1999. Part of NASA’s
Earth Observing System, Terra flies in a Sun-synchronous polar
orbit. The ASTER instrument can revisit any place on Earth at
least every 16 days, and researchers will be able to request that
ASTER take images of specific areas.

The Terra spacecraft, flagship of a fleet of satellites
dedicated to understanding our global environment, is part of
NASA’s Earth Sciences Enterprise, a long-term research program
dedicated to understanding how human-induced and natural changes
affect our world.