Alaska Satellite Facility Ready for Flood of Radar Data

NISAR is NASA’s first SAR satellite mission since 1978. ASF is one of four facilities around the globe collecting NISAR data for NASA. Others are in Svalbard, Norway; Punta Arenas, Chile; and at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. ASF will archive and distribute all NASA-collected L-band SAR data and some selected S-band SAR data acquired over the United States.

“It’s not just scientists using the data anymore,” Albright says. “It’s people in operations; it’s teachers; it’s GIS analysts. Giving them the tools and skills to spend less time manipulating the data and more time actually working with the data is important.”

NISAR is the first satellite to use dual-frequency L-band and S-band synthetic aperture radar and will provide more radar imagery and cover more surface area than other satellites. The mission’s goal is to monitor and measure surface changes such as land subsidence, seismic movements, glacier and ice sheet changes, and sea levels.

“With NISAR we will be much better at describing how displacements evolve over time than is possible with current L-band missions, especially on a global scale,” says Franz Meyer, chief scientist at ASF, a unit of the UAF Geophysical Institute.

Meyer is also a member of the NISAR science team and a geophysics professor with the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics, specializing in remote sensing.

The L-band radar will cover nearly all of Earth’s land surfaces, glaciers, and coastal regions twice every twelve days. “It will have a massive scientific impact because it feeds into not just one science discipline but a whole range of them,” Meyer says. “It’s also massive in terms of the data volume.”

NISAR will generate about 40 petabytes of data annually. That compares to the 2 petabytes that ASF archives annually from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellite, the largest data volume currently from any of the satellites ASF holds in its archives.

One petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes. Personal computers generally have 8 to 32 gigabytes of data storage.

“We’ve known for a long time that NISAR will bring data volumes that we haven’t seen before,” says Meyer. “We spent many years with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA thinking about how to make this dataset accessible to the community so that they can use it in a meaningful way. Everything we do these days is designed with this goal in mind.”

Albright says NISAR’s launch marks a new chapter in Earth science.

“The launch and the satellite are tremendous technical achievements,” he says. “Now we wait for the data that we know will provide great advances in understanding our planet.”