From www.gearthblog.com -

One of the top stories yesterday was how NASA and Japan have released the data from their ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) satellite on the Internet - for free. What is significant about this is that the data covers 99% of the entire Earth's landmass terrain - verses 80% from the SRTM (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission) - which was the best previously available free public terrain data. ASTER's data is also higher resolution than SRTM which had a base resolution of 90m and at best 30m. ASTER's resolution has a base resolution of 30m, and can be higher under certain conditions (up to 7-10m - see documentation).

Thought this might be interesting.

From www.gearthblog.com -Thought this might be interesting.

This is currently being discussed in the mesh scenery design forum on AVSim. The quality of thedata is so-so. Some artifacts remain, coast lines are not accurate (bad sea level determination)Right now, no one seems to be able to download much data - download servers are overwhelmed.Christian