On top of the world: Covering Mount Everest in 3D from a Stemme powered glider with the airborne high-altitude camera system MACS – Himalaya

In January 2014 a flight campaign in Nepal took place in the context of the Mountain Wave Project (MWP). One of the goals was to cover several areas of interest (Kathmandu, Seti Valley, Mount Everest Region, Kali Gandaki Valley) with an aerial camera system and to photogrammetrically derive 3D information from the image data. For this purpose the MACS-Himalaya (Modular Airborne Camera System) was designed and built within 11 months at the Institute for Optical Sensor Systems at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Berlin-Adlershof. The system design was speci1cally adapted to the environmental and geometric conditions and prerequisites. The 4-head systems (3 RGB, 1 IR) with two nadir looking and two oblique looking heads has a total FOV of 120Âr, optimized to map narrow steep valleys and mountain sides. The system has a High Dynamic Range (HDR) mode taking images at several integration times to ensure that both bright (sunny snow) and dark (shaded vegetation) details are well exposed. Despite of the HDR mode still a very high overlap along track could be acquired due to high frame rates, which allows the generation of very dense point clouds from all sensor heads including the oblique sensors. The resolution strongly varies due to the steep morphology, with an average resolution of about 25cm. Despite of the diZcult operational conditions all targets could be successfully covered. First data products (points clouds, DSM, True Orthoimages) have been calculated, which are used for mapping and as input for different applications like monitoring and prediction of glaciers or natural hazards. The story of the 2ight campaign and 1rst results from the image data are presented