NASA Radar Brings a New View of World Heritage Site

In just two 10-minute overflights, an airborne NASA synthetic aperture radar proved it could pinpoint areas of disturbance in Peru's Nasca lines World Heritage Site. The data collected on the two flights will help Peruvian authorities fully catalog the thousand-year-old designs drawn on the ground in and around the site for the first time, as well as giving them a new tool for protecting the fragile constructions from both careless humans and natural disturbances such as floods.

The hummingbird glyph and its surroundings in the Nasca world heritage site as seen by standard photography, left, and by NASA's UAVSAR instrument, right. Dark areas in the UAVSAR image are where the site has been disturbed.
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