First Radar Images from NISAR

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Imagery of Maine’s Mount Desert Island captured by NISAR’s L-band radar on 21 Aug 2025. NASA/JPL-Caltech.
Imagery of Maine’s Mount Desert Island captured by NISAR’s L-band radar on 21 Aug 2025. NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Preliminary images are in from the newly launched NISAR Earth-observing radar satellite. A joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), NISAR will use L-band and S-band synthetic aperture radar to produce images of land cover, soil moisture, vegetation, sea and ice and so forth at resolutions of five to ten metres. (For comparison, SRTM’s resolution is one arcsecond—30 metres at the equator.)