NISAR Satellite Captures Mount St. Helens Through Clouds
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- NISAR captured an image of Washington's Mount St. Helens on November 10, 2025, with its L-band SAR instrument seeing through Pacific Northwest cloud cover to reveal the surface below.
- NISAR launched in July 2025 from India's Satish Dhawan Space Center as a joint NASA-ISRO mission and is the first satellite to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths.
- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the U.S. component and provided the L-band SAR and antenna reflector, while ISRO contributed the spacecraft bus and S-band SAR; Caltech manages the mission overall.
- The satellite's drum-shaped reflector measures 39 feet (12 meters) wide — the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space.
- NISAR will monitor Earth's land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days.
- The image's color coding distinguishes surface features: magenta dots mark flat surfaces like roads, yellow-green indicates forests and wetlands, dark blue reveals smooth surfaces or mountaintop clearings, and purple squares near the mountain's foot show man-made forest-thinning patches.
Why it matters: NISAR's cloud-penetrating L-band radar and 12-day revisit cycle give researchers an all-weather tool for monitoring land and ice surfaces — and this image demonstrates the mission's ability to distinguish subtle features like forest-thinning patterns and vegetation-free clearings at a 39-foot-reflector resolution no prior NASA radar has matched.
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