NASA to Conduct Radar Study of Haiti

Experts at the American space agency, NASA, have announced that they have added a number of scientific overflights above the devastated nation of Haiti, as well as over the Dominican Republic. The flights have been added to missions that were scheduled some time ago, and they again highlight NASA's commitment to ensuring that as much data is gathered on the January 12 earthquake as possible.

All fault lines on the island of Hispaniola, which includes Haiti and the Dominican Republic, will be surveyed by the repeat-pass L-band wavelength radar, which is a device developed at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena, California. The device is installed aboard a Gulfstream III aircraft, and is called the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR. It took off on Monday, January 25, from the Dryden Flight Research Center. This facility is located at the Edwards Air Force Base, in California.

“UAVSAR will allow us to image deformations of Earth's surface and other changes associated with post-Haiti earthquake geologic processes, such as aftershocks, earthquakes that might be triggered by the main earthquake farther down the fault line, and the potential for landslides,” the principal investigator for the scientific flights, JPL scientist Paul Lundgren, explains. In addition to featuring variable viewing geometry capabilities, the new system is also more than capable of producing high-resolution images of its targets, all of this during very swift flights.

“Because of Hispaniola's complex tectonic setting, there is an interest in determining if the earthquake in Haiti might trigger other earthquakes at some unknown point in the future, either along adjacent sections of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault that was responsible for the main earthquake, or on other faults in northern Hispaniola, such as the Septentrional fault,” Lundgren believes. He adds that UAVSAR relies on an observation technique known as the interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR. The method is based on emitting pulses of microwave energy from an aircraft, which are sensitive enough to sense even small disturbances in the soils.