Sep 25, 2025
MOUNT DESERT ISLAND—A lot of people take a lot of images of Mount Desert Island, the home of a significant portion of Acadia National Park, but NASA’s new image of the island? It’s newsworthy.
That’s because it’s a little hard to beat being one of the first shots taken from 464 miles above the Earth’s surface from a satellite in polar orbit.
The $1.3 billion mission, which is a partnership between the United States and India, will track and survey the Earth’s land and ice more than once. The tracking, which goes down to a fraction of an inch, is meant to allow emergency responders and forecasters a heads-up and faster response to potential disasters such as earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic eruptions.
The photos of Mount Desert Island were taken August 21 by the satellite’s L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system.
The green areas are wooded areas. The magenta portions are surfaces that are hard or “regular” such as buildings or bare ground. The dark areas are water.
According to a press release from the agency, September 25, “The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Earth-observing radar satellite’s first images of our planet’s surface are in, and they offer a glimpse of things to come as the joint mission between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) approaches full science operations later this year.”
“The L-band radar system can resolve objects as small as 15 feet (5 meters), enabling the image to display narrow waterways cutting across the island, as well as the islets dotting the waters around it,” according to NASA.
Land cover is made apparent in the images. This, according to NASA, can also help show crops’ growth during seasons of growing.
“Launched under President Trump in conjunction with India, NISAR’s first images are a testament to what can be achieved when we unite around a shared vision of innovation and discovery,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “This is only the beginning. NASA will continue to build upon the incredible scientific advancements of the past and present as we pursue our goal to maintain our nation’s space dominance through Gold Standard Science.”
The aircraft launched July 30, 2025. The information scanned, according to the release, allows for “unique, actionable information to decision-makers in a diverse range of areas, including disaster response, infrastructure monitoring, and agricultural management.”
“By understanding how our home planet works, we can produce models and analysis of how other planets in our solar system and beyond work as we prepare to send humanity on an epic journey back to the Moon and onward to Mars,” said NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya. “The successful capture of these first images from NISAR is a remarkable example of how partnership and collaboration between two nations, on opposite sides of the world, can achieve great things together for the benefit of all.”
“These initial images are just a preview of the hard-hitting science that NISAR will produce — data and insights that will enable scientists to study Earth’s changing land and ice surfaces in unprecedented detail while equipping decision-makers to respond to natural disasters and other challenges,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “They are also a testament to the years of hard work of hundreds of scientists and engineers from both sides of the world to build an observatory with the most advanced radar system ever launched by NASA and ISRO.”
Using a 10-inch (25-centimeter) wavelength, the L-band system’s signals can get through a canopy of a forest. It can take soil moisture measurements. It can determine how the surface of ice moves (to fractions of an inch). This helps scientists see how the land’s surface reacts and moves around events such as earthquakes, landslides and volcanic eruptions.
NASA wrote of the mission, which is part of a multi-year collaboration with ISRO, “The preliminary L-band images are an example of what the mission team will be able to produce when the science phase begins in November. The satellite was raised into its operational 464-mile (747-kilometer) orbit in mid-September.”
It will look at the Earth’s surfaces two times for every 12 days, but for now, residents of Mount Desert Island get to claim that the first images? It was of our home.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
More About NISAR
The NISAR mission is a partnership between NASA and ISRO spanning years of technical and programmatic collaboration. The successful launch and deployment of NISAR builds upon a strong heritage of cooperation between the United States and India in space. The data produced by NISAR’s two radar systems, one provided by NASA and one by ISRO, will be a testament to what can be achieved when countries unite around a shared vision of innovation and discovery.
The ISRO Space Applications Centre provided the mission’s S-band SAR. The U R Rao Satellite Centre provided the spacecraft bus. Launch services were through Satish Dhawan Space Centre. After launch, key operations, including boom and radar antenna reflector deployment, are being executed and monitored by the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network’s global system of ground stations.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California leads the U.S. component of the project. In addition to the L-band SAR, reflector, and boom, JPL also provided the high-rate communication subsystem for science data, a solid-state data recorder, and payload data subsystem. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the Near Space Network, which receives NISAR’s L-band data.
To learn more about NISAR, visit: https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov
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