Three striking and important areas of Tanzania in eastern Africa are
shown in this color-coded shaded relief image from the Shuttle Radar
Topography Mission. The largest circular feature in the center right is
the caldera, or central crater, of the extinct volcano Ngorongoro. It is
surrounded by a number of smaller volcanoes, all associated with the
Great Rift Valley, a geologic fault system that extends for about 4,830
kilometers (2,995 miles) from Syria to central Mozambique.
Ngorongoro's caldera is 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) across at its
widest point and is 610 meters (2,000 feet) deep. Its floor is very
level, holding a lake fed by streams running down the caldera wall. It
is part of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and is home to over 75,000
animals. The lakes south of the crater are Lake Eyasi and Lake Manyara,
also part of the conservation area.
The relatively smooth region in the upper left of the image is the
Serengeti National Park, the largest in Tanzania. The park encompasses
the main part of the Serengeti ecosystem, supporting the greatest
remaining concentration of plains game in Africa including more than
3,000,000 large mammals. The animals roam the park freely and in the
spectacular migrations, huge herds of wild animals move to other areas
of the park in search of greener grazing grounds (requiring over 4,000
tons of grass each day) and water.
The faint, nearly horizontal line near the center of the image is
Olduvai Gorge, made famous by the discovery of remains of the earliest
humans to exist. Between 1.9 and 1.2 million years ago a salt lake
occupied this area, followed by the appearance of fresh water streams and
small ponds. Exposed deposits show rich fossil fauna, many hominid
remains and items belonging to one of the oldest stone tool
technologies, called Olduwan. The time span of the objects recovered
dates from 2,100,000 to 15,000 years ago.
Two visualization methods were combined to produce the image: shading
and color coding of topographic height. The shade image was derived by
computing topographic slope in the northwest-southeast direction, so that
northwest slopes appear bright and southeast slopes appear dark. Color
coding is directly related to topographic height, with green at the lower
elevations, rising through yellow and tan, to white at the highest
elevations.
Elevation data used in this image were acquired by the Shuttle Radar
Topography Mission aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, launched on Feb.
11, 2000. SRTM used the same radar instrument that comprised the
Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR)
that flew twice on the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994. SRTM was designed
to collect 3-D measurements of the Earth's surface. To collect the 3-D
data, engineers added a 60-meter (approximately 200-foot) mast, installed
additional C-band and X-band antennas, and improved tracking and
navigation devices. The mission is a cooperative project between NASA,
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) of the U.S. Department
of Defense and the German and Italian space agencies. It is managed by
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Earth
Science Enterprise, Washington, D.C.
Location: 3 degrees south latitude, 35 degrees east longitude
Orientation: North toward the top, Mercator projection
Size: 223 by 223 kilometers (138 by 138 miles)
Image Data: shaded and colored SRTM elevation model
Date Acquired: February 2000