German satellite TanDEM-X launch a success

ASD News : An Earth observation satellite, TanDEM-X, was successfully launched today from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan by the public–private partnership of aerospace company Astrium and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). TanDEM-X will fly with its twin TerraSAR-X, a German radar satellite launched in 2007, on a three-year mission to survey all 150 million square kilometers of Earth’s land surface for commercial, research, and security applications. “This will be the first time we will ever have had a globally standardized 3D digital elevation model of Earth,” said Alberto Moreira, science director of the TanDEM-X mission and director of the DLR Microwaves and Radar Institute.