US-India Satellite Delivers Data, Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica

-India Earth-orbiting NISAR satellite to produce this image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. NASA/JPL-Caltech The image shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja at center-left, surrounded by ice fractured with crevasses, which are shown as sharp, green lines. The magenta portions of the image represent more regular surfaces, such as smooth ice.

-India Earth-orbiting NISAR satellite to produce this image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. NASA/JPL-Caltech The image shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja at center-left, surrounded by ice fractured with crevasses, which are shown as sharp, green lines. The magenta portions of the image represent more regular surfaces, such as smooth ice.

-India Earth-orbiting NISAR satellite to produce this image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. The annotations point out the sharp green lines that indicate ice fractured with crevasses. Magenta represents more regular surfaces, such as smooth ice.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech As of July 20, the public can access data from the two powerful radar instruments aboard the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite.   The release comes as NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) prepare to celebrate the first anniversary of NISAR’s July 30, 2025 , launch from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Since that time, the mission engineering and science teams have been busy calibrating instrumentation, refining algorithms, and monitoring nearly all the planet’s land- and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days.

   An early image released Tuesday revealed the fractured, barren surface of an Antarctic landscape in stark detail.   Despite its otherworldly quality, the Antarctic image shows a very real geographical feature called Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop in East Antarctica, poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean.    “First, it’s a beautiful image, with rich details of features that provide insights to how the glacier is moving.

Then, because radar can often see through snow and deep into the ice, NISAR can observe fundamentally different properties of Antarctic ice than can be seen in optical imagery,” said Seongsu Jeong, the signal analysis engineer who produced the image at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. S.    The colors show differences in the way polarized microwave signals, which vibrate in different directions, interact with and reflect from the ice.

Over Antarctica, NISAR transmits radar waves toward Earth with a horizontal polarization.   Signals that come back with a horizontal polarization likely bounced off a more regular surface, such as smooth ice. Those signals appear magenta in the image.

Signals that return with vertical polarization may have refracted as they partially penetrated the snow and ice or scattered at different angles as they reflected off irregular surfaces, such as the faces of crevasses.   The same scene viewed in optical light is almost entirely white with ice and snow.   An image from the Landsat 9 satellite shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja on Nov.

2, 2025. Because microwaves can penetrate frozen surfaces, signals from NISAR’s L-band radar captured more detail of the structure of the surrounding icescape than is visible in this optical image. USGS Access to data   The NISAR satellite is the first free-flying space mission to feature two radar instruments: an L-band system and an S-band system.

The systems are complementary due to their differing wavelengths. For example, the longer-wave L-band can pass through tree canopies, imaging the ground beneath. S.

side of the mission started releasing calibrated products continuously for all L-band measurements collected since June 17. By the end of the year, the team expects to have released all data acquired earlier during science operations.    The NISAR mission’s science data output is vast, on the order of dozens of terabytes a day, due to the satellite’s frequent coverage of nearly all the land and ice surfaces on Earth.

S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. gov/mission/nisar/ Media Contacts Andrew Wang / Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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