A public Web site has been developed as a method for displaying the multitude of radar imagery collected by NASA’s Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIR-SAR) instrument during its 16-year mission. Utilizing NASA’s internal AIRSAR site, the new Web site features more sophisticated visualization tools that enable the general public to have access to these images.

The site was originally maintained at NASA on six computers: one that held the Oracle database, two that took care of the software for the interactive map, and three that were for the Web site itself. Several tasks were involved in moving this complicated setup to just one computer.

First, the AIRSAR database was migrated from Oracle to MySQL. Then the back-end of the AIRSAR Web site was updated in order to access the MySQL database. To do this, a few of the scripts needed to be modified; specifically three Perl scripts that query that database. The database connections were then updated from Oracle to MySQL, numerous syntax errors were corrected, and a query was implemented that replaced one of the stored Oracle procedures. Lastly, the interactive map was designed, implemented, and tested so that users could easily browse and access the radar imagery through the Google Maps interface.

This work was done by Bruce D. Chapman of Caltech and Sarah Gibas of the University of California Irvine for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For more information, see http://airsar.jpl.nasa.gov .

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Daniel Broderick of the California Institute of Technology at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Refer to NPO-46492.