The Blooming of ASTER Data

An image of Death Valley - the lowest, driest, and hottest location in North America - composed of a simulated natural color image overlayed with digital topography data from the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model. (BBC)

The BBC is reporting that data from Japan's Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (Aster) aboard the Terra satellite has been combined to create the world's most complete terrain map ever:

"This is the most complete, consistent global digital elevation data yet made available to the world," said Woody Turner, Nasa programme scientist on the Aster mission. "This unique global set of data will serve users and researchers from a wide array of disciplines that need elevation and terrain information."

And after a quick look around, here is the host site. I'll look around a bit more; I suspect the file is larger than I want to deal with, at least until I open up some more space on my hard drive.

Followup: The map appears to be a massive data set, not an immediately viewable "map." I expect it will eventually trickle into Google Earth, which is the app I'll continue using for the time being.