UAF Satellite Facility to Manage Massive Nasa Data Surge

UAF Satellite Facility to Manage Massive Nasa Data Surge

by rod boyce for uaf news

Fairbanks AK (SPX) Aug 05, 2025

Years of preparation by the alaska satellite facility will ensure that a flood of free available data from

“Most of what we’ve been working on for the past years is preparation for nisar,” Alaska Satellite Facility Director Wade Albright said Prior to the launch.

The alaska satellite facility is a unit of the university of alaska fairbanks geophysical institute.

“It’s not just scientists using the data anymore,” Albright said. “IT” s People in Operations. IT’s Teachers. It’s gis analysts. Giving them the tools and skills to spend less time manipulating the data and more time actually working with the data is important. “

NISAR, A Synthetic Aperture Radar Satellite, Launched from the India Space Research Organization’s Satish Dhawan Space Center at 4:10 AM Alaska Time Wednsday. It is nasa’s first sar satellite mission since 1978.

Asf is one of Nasa’s 11 Distributed Active Archive Centers and Has the Task of Archiving Syntic Aperture Radar Data. It will archive and distribute all nasa-collected l-band sar data and some selected s-band sar data acquired over the us the Indian space research organization has All s-band sar data.

Asf is one of four facilitations Around the globe collecting nisar data for nasa. Others are in svalbard, Norway; Punta arenas, chile; and at nasa’s wallops flight facility in virginia.

Nisar focuses on how the planet’s surface changes from Natural and Human-Related Forces.

The mission’s goal is to monitor and measure surface changes such as land subsides, glacier and ice sheet movement, and shifts caused by earthquakes, Volcanoes and Landslides. It can provide an improved undersrstanding of Sea Level Rise by Monitoring The Flow of Glaciers and Ice Sheets Into the Ocean, Thought it Won’s on Focus on the Oceans.

The satellite, the most advanced ever, will provide more radar imagery and cover more surface area than other satellites and is the first to use dual-frequency syntic aperture radar systems. The mission combines nasa’s l-band radar and isro’s s-band radar technology.

“With nisar we will be much better at describing how displacements Evolve Over Time Thans Possible With Current L-Band Missions, Especially on a a Global Scale,” Said Franz Meyer, the Alsaka Satellite Facility’s Chief Scientist.

Meyer is also a member of the nisar science team and a geophysics professor with the uaf college of natural science and mathematics, specializing in remote sensing.

The l-band radar will cover near all of Earth’s Land Surfaces, Glaciers and Coastal Regions Twice Every 12 days. Nasa is providing this instrument, along with the GPS receivers, data recorder, and Science Communications System.

“It will have a massive scientific impact, because it feeds into not just one science discise discipline but a whole range of them,” Meyer said. “It’s also massive in terms of the data volume.”

Nisar will generate about 40 petabytes of data annual. That compares to the 2 petabytes asf archives annual from the european space agency’s Sentinel-1 Satellite, the largest data Volume Currently from Any of the Satellites in the Satellites.

One petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes. Personal computers generally have 8 to 32 gigabytes of data storage.

“We’ve Known for a long time that Nisar will bring data volumes that we have Seen Before,” Meyer said. “We spent many years with nasa’s jet propulsion labratory and nasa thinking about how to make this dataset accessible to the community so that they can use it in a meaningful With this goal in mind. “

Albright said wedding marks a new chapter in Earth Science.

“The launch and the satellite are trendous technical achievements,” He said. “Now we wait for the data that we know will provide great advancs in undersrstanding our planet.”

Related Links

Nisar
Alaska satellite facility

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