Satellites are great, especially if you have modified SM-3 missile and a $60 million budget. Besides “unclassified purposes”, they have some suprising uses as well, such as finding long lost archaeological sites. Using images taken by Landsat and IKONOS of Tikal, a Mayan city in the Guatemalan rainforest, archaeologists were able to find several areas which were ancient building sites.
The same thing is happening in India.
The ISRO scientists are believed to have told the State archaeologists about a “sizeably big structure” buried about 175 to 200 metres north-east of Kirti Narayana Temple. Further study on the disclosure is in progress for authentication.
“The ISRO team strongly believes, from the images derived from the satellites, that a structure could have been buried close to the temple. They have brought satellite images of the place (where the structure might have been buried) for correlation. If the information matches with the field observations, then it could be one of the biggest achievements in the field of archaeology,” Dr. Gopal told The Hindu.[Groundbreaking: Satellite images aid archaeological excavations]
What next? Will people start using Google Maps and Google Earth to find ancient buildings?
I was wondering if somebody has had a look at the location mentioned in Google Earth. Can they make out what the article is referring too?
This all sounds super exciting.