The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) successfully collected Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (IFSAR) data over 80 percent of the landmass of the Earth between 60 degrees North and 56 degrees South latitudes in February 2000. The mission was co-sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) performed preliminary processing of SRTM data and forwarded partially finished data directly to NGA for finishing by NGA's contractors and subsequent monthly deliveries to the NGA Digital Products Data Wharehouse (DPDW). All the data products delivered by the contractors conform to the NGA SRTM products and the NGA Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) to the Earth Resources Observation & Science (EROS) Center. The DPDW ingests the SRTM data products, checks them for formatting errors, loads the SRTM DTED into the NGA data distribution system, and ships the public domain SRTM DTED to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation & Science (EROS) Center.

Two resolutions of finished grade SRTM data are available through EarthExplorer from the collection held in the USGS EROS archive:

1 arc-second (approximately 30-meter) high resolution elevation data are only available for the United States.

3 arc-second (approximately 90-meter) medium resolution elevation data are available for global coverage. The 3 arc-second data were resampled using cubic convolution interpolation for regions between 60° north and 56° south latitude.

[Summary provided by the USGS.]