ESA Embraces Open Source With New SAR Toolbox 62
phyr writes "The European Space Agency (ESA) has released its Next ESA SAR Toolbox (NEST) freely as GPL for Linux and Windows. It provides an integrated viewer for reading, calibrating, post-processing and analysis of ESA (ERS 1&2, ENVISAT) and 3rd party (Radarsat2, TerraSarX, Alos Palsar, JERS) SAR level 1 data and higher. ESA has chosen to distribute the software as fully open source to allow the remote sensing community to easily develop new readers/writers and post-processors for SAR data with their NEST Java API. The software provides both a command line interface and GUI for all features including data conversion, graph processing, coregistration, multilooking, filtering, and band arithmetic."
SAR (Score:5, Informative)
Synthetic Aperture Radar [wikipedia.org]
Re:Visualization (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.opendx.org/
Re:Visualization (Score:3, Informative)
R [r-project.org]?
Re:Visualization (Score:3, Informative)
OpenDX [opendx.org] is good. is also popular, leading to some nice packages like MayaVi2. ChomboVis [lbl.gov] is no longer under development but may also prove useful. GGobi [ggobi.org] is another very nice toolkit. For a more mathematical visualization, there's also always Octave [gnu.org].
ESA has been doing this for years (Score:5, Informative)
ESA has been sponsoring FOSS projects for years; I worked on the GPL'ed BEAT [stcorp.nl] software no less than seven years ago that was commissioned by ESA (disclosure: I am no longer with the company that develops it).
See here [esa.int] for more examples of open source software funded by ESA. They are really ahead of the pack in this respect.
Re:In English? (Score:1, Informative)
They are all Earth observing satellites using Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR). Satellite sends down a radar pulse, picks up the backscattered returns and processes it into an image. From there analysis can tell you a bunch of things: you can monitor sea ice, detect oil slicks, find ships, monitor vegetation, etc. For a lot of applications SAR is excellent because the pulses go right through clouds and you do not need solar illumination to be able to see.