STS-99

**STS-99**
Organization	NASA-Office of Space Flight (United States)
Mission type	Earth Science
Launch date	February 11, 2000
Launch vehicle	Space Shuttle
Launch site	Cape Canaveral, United States
COSPAR ID	2000-010A
Inclination	57 degrees
Experiments	Here
Alternate Names	26088
Additional Information	Here
Data Collection	Here
Payload Mass Up	13600 kg
Payload Mass Down	13063.64 kg
Orbiter	Endeavour
Lift Off Mass	2,054,734.09 kg
Orbiter Weight at Liftoff	116,618.18 kg
Orbiter Weight at Landing	102,576.82 kg
Landed	Concrete runway 33 at Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
Orbits of Earth	182
Orbital Altitude	126 nautical miles (145 statute miles)

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[edit] Crew

Commander: Kevin R. Kregel
Pilot: Dominic L. Gorie
- Payload Commander:
- Mission Specialist 1: Gerhard P.J. Thiele
- Mission Specialist 2: Janet L. Kavandi
- Mission Specialist 3: Janice Voss
- Mission Specialist 4: Mamoru Mohri
- Mission Specialist 5:
- Payload Specialist 1:
- Payload Specialist 2:

ISS/Mir Crew Transport

[edit] Mission

STS 99 is an American shuttle spacecraft that was launched from Cape Canaveral at 17:43 UT. The main mission was to obtain a 3-D map of about 70% global terrain. It is a joint mapping mission by NASA and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), utilizing the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) radars. The 13,600 kg SRTM instrument consisted of a pair of transmit/receive antennas below the cargo bay, and a pair of receiving antennas at the end of a 60 m "rigid" tower. The operation was in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IF-SAR) modes with steerable C-band (5.6 cm) and a non-steerable X-band (3.0 cm) transmissions of pulse widths 100 milliseconds, and power levels 10 kW. The accuracy of the mapping was modest: in any "terrain" segment, the relative height accuracy was 10 m and the relative horizontal accuracy was 20 m; on forests, the surface of reflection at both frequencies were the canopy tops, not the terrain. The tower was an assembly of stacked cubical frames made of steel, titanium and plastic, initially contained in a three meter can, pushed out by a motor and held in rigid shape by a thruster at the high end. It was erected at an angle of 450 from the vertical. The cargo bay antennas and the transmitters were the same that were used in the SIR-C/X-SAR radars that were flown on two shuttle missions in 1994. SRTM just had additional receiving antennas at the end of the mast to do interferometry. It landed back in Cape Canaveral on 22 February at 23:22 UT after mapping 112 million square-kilometers of the Earth's land mass onto 300 digital tapes. Data reduction at analysis centers will take two or three years to complete. More information on SRTM is available at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/ and the data will be distributed by the EROS Data Center, http://edc.usgs.gov/.