NEW DELHI (dpa-AFX) - A new satellite from NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation aims to help researchers get a better understanding of natural and human-caused disasters and help prepare for and recover from them.
Data from NISAR, or NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, will improve the understanding of such phenomena as earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides, as well as damage to infrastructure.
The NISAR mission will measure the motion of nearly all of the earth's land and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days. The pace of NISAR's data collection will give researchers a complete picture of how Earth's surface changes over time. 'This kind of regular observation allows us to look at how Earth's surface moves across nearly the entire planet,' said Cathleen Jones, NISAR applications lead at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Together with complementary measurements from other satellites and instruments, NISAR's data will provide a more complete picture of how Earth's surface moves horizontally and vertically. The information will be crucial to better understanding everything from the mechanics of Earth's crust to which parts of the world are prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It could even help resolve whether sections of a levee are damaged or if a hillside is starting to move in a landslide, according o a NASA press release.
Targeting to launch from India early next year, the satellite will be able to track the motion of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice, and map changes to vegetation.
'The NISAR satellite won't tell us when earthquakes will happen. Instead, it will help us better understand which areas of the world are most susceptible to significant earthquakes,' said Mark Simons, the U.S. solid Earth science lead for the mission at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
'From the ISRO perspective, we are particularly interested in the Himalayan plate boundary,' said Sreejith K M, the ISRO solid Earth science lead for NISAR at the Space Applications Center in Ahmedabad, India. 'The area has produced great magnitude earthquakes in the past, and NISAR will give us unprecedented information on the seismic hazards of the Himalaya.'
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