NASA Airborne Radar Catches Glimpse of Haiti

As we were telling you last week, the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), operated by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California, managed to conduct a preliminary survey of the post-earthquake Haiti. The false-color images show a country devastated by the January 12 tremor, and the fault line that triggered the natural disaster can also be positively identified. Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, and the city that was hit the strongest, is visible to the center of the image. The UAVSAR departed from the Dryden Flight Research Center, in Edwards, California, on January 25, mounted aboard a modified Gulfstream III aircraft.

It was scheduled to conduct a three-week mission over Central America, but NASA officials decided to include Haiti in the observation plan, given the scale of the devastation that struck the impoverished island nation. The new photo clearly shows the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault line, the area where the massive, 7.0-magnitude earthquake originated. It stretched East to West (left to right in the photo), below the dark feature that represents a section of the Atlantic Ocean. The fault extends from the western tip of Haiti past Port-au-Prince into the Dominican Republic to the right of this radar image.

“Satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar measurements show that the January 12 earthquake ruptured a segment of the fault extending from the epicenter westward over a length of about 40 kilometers (25 miles), leaving the section of the fault in this image unruptured. The earthquake has increased the stress on this eastern section of the fault south of Port-au-Prince and the section west of the rupture. This has significantly increased the risk of a future earthquake, according to a recent report by the US Geological Survey,” the JPL team writes on its official website.

This is the first of a series of observations that will be conducted above Haiti. The map will be merged with others that will be obtained through similar processes. The purpose for that is to use a technique called interferometry to analyze the differences that occur in this region during the time frame that elapses between the moments each of the images are taken. “The interferometric measurements will allow scientists to study the pressures building up and being released on the fault at depth,” JPL experts add.