Vexcel maps Mother Earth.

• Author: LUSKY, HEATHER
• Position: Brief Article

Vexcel Corp., a Boulder company that has helped map everything from the movement of Antarctic ice to the planet Venus over the past 15 years, is now helping to map Mother Earth.

The private company's mainstay technology, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), is used as an imaging application from sensor-carrying satellites and airplanes. It was used recently to assemble digital terrain earth models for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, a unit of the U.S. Defense Department.

Vexcel's data-capture system helped collect raw information during the space shuttle's Radar Topography Mission, which in early 2000 gathered radar data covering 80 percent of the Earth's landmass. With Rockville, Md.-based defense contractor BAE Systems North America, Vexcel's engineers are processing that information for NIMA, which has been ordered to produce the most detailed map of earth ever made.

The data also can be used to improve topological maps for natural resource exploration, flight safety, hydrologic modeling, land-use planning, line-of-sight determination for communications and military tactical simulations.

Today's U.S. satellites are optical -- meaning that they can only passively capture energy reflecting off earth during non-cloudy, daytime periods. Ron McCoy, Vexcel's director of marketing...