Shuttle Radar Scans Sahara for Signs of Lost Civilizations

The most advanced radar ever sent into space by NASA peered beneath the sand of the Sahara Desert on Monday for traces of ancient river channels and lost civilizations.

Two days into the 10-day flight, the radar aboard space shuttle Endeavour had mapped about 3 million square miles of Earth’s surface, an area equivalent to half the United States.

After some initial difficulty, the $366-million worth of radar equipment is providing unprecedented three-dimensional maps of deserts, mountains, oceans, rivers and cropland.

Scientists hope these images will help them better understand environmental changes and provide the world’s policy-makers with ways to preserve Earth.

That is the future. There is also the past: Archeologists and historians want to see radar images of the Sahara, Arabian and Chinese deserts.

“This area is of particular interest, not only for past climate change . . . but also the archeology aspect is extremely exciting,” said project scientist Diane Evans, a geologist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Previous radar images and pictures from space led to the discovery in Oman of what is believed to be the lost city of Ubar, called “the Atlantis of the sands” by Lawrence of Arabia. Excavators believe the city was an ancient trading center for frankincense.

As Endeavour flew 138 miles over Algeria, the radar scanned the Central Sahara for ancient tributaries of the Niger River. One of the three radar wavelengths can penetrate as much as 10 feet beneath the surface.