What is the Ames Stereo Pipeline?#
Work in progress
Placeholder content. Being rewritten with figures.
The NASA Ames Stereo Pipeline (ASP) is open-source software that turns pairs (or sets) of overlapping satellite or planetary images into digital elevation models (DEMs).
A short history#
ASP began at NASA Ames in the late 2000s for planetary stereo (Mars, Moon) and grew to support Earth-observation sensors; it remains actively developed at NASA Ames Research Center.
A toolchain of modular executables#
ASP is not one program but dozens of single-purpose command-line binaries (bundle_adjust, mapproject, parallel_stereo, point2dem, pc_align, …) that pipe outputs into each other. This UNIX-style modularity is powerful but means the workflow is expressed as a sequence of CLI invocations.
Why “stereo”?#
A single satellite image cannot recover height; two images of the same ground from different angles produce parallax, which encodes height.
Where asp_plot fits#
asp_plot reads ASP’s scattered output files and produces diagnostic figures and PDF reports; it’s used at every step of this guide.
What’s next#
Pipeline overview — the full flow.
Open the Codespace — run a real pipeline.
ASTER tutorial — gentlest end-to-end notebook.