karn (11/29/82)
I believe it was the second flight of Columbia which carried the Shuttle Imaging Radar experiment that discovered the hidden Sahara rivers. The current issue of Scientific American has an excellent article on the results of this experiment, as well as a similar radar flown on Seasat several years ago. Part of the delay in getting results from these experiments was probably the enormous amount of computing required to process the raw radar data. According to the SciAm article, a Cray-1 can work in about 1/10 real time (ie., it would take 10 seconds on a Cray-1 to process one second of data.)