[font style="font-weight: bold;" size="5"]Lost Mayan Ruins Found From Space[/font]
Pretty slick trick. NASA archaeologist Tom Sever and scientist Dan Irwin, and University of New Hampshire archaeologist William Saturno used "remote-sensing" technology to uncover Maya ruins from space without having to trek though jungles (which wouldn't have worked, anyway).
[blockquote][em]"From the air, everything but the tops of very few surviving pyramids are hidden by the tree canopy," said Sever, widely recognized for two decades as a pioneer in the use of aerospace remote-sensing for archaeology. "On the ground, the 60- to 100-foot trees and dense undergrowth can obscure objects as close as 10 feet away.
Explorers can stumble right through an ancient city that once housed thousands — and never even realize it."[/em][/p] [em]Sever has explored the capacity of remote sensing technology and the science of collecting information about the Earth's surface using aerial or space-based photography to serve archeology. He and Irwin provided Saturno with high-resolution commercial satellite images of the rainforest, and collected data from NASA's Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar, an instrument capable of penetrating clouds, snow and forest canopies and flown aboard a converted McDonnel Douglas DC-8 serving as a flying science laboratory. NASA's DC-8 was operated by Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.[/em][/p] [em]These resulting Earth observations have helped the team survey an uncharted region around San Bartolo, Guatemala. They discovered a correlation between the color and reflectivity of the vegetation seen in the images — their "signature," which is captured by instruments measuring light in the visible and near-infrared spectrums — and the location of known archaeological sites.[/em][/p] [/blockquote] [a href="http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/news/releases/2006/06-018.html"]Link[/a]
