Eyes on Infrastructure: How the NISAR Satellite Will Help Keep Communities Safer
A failure of key infrastructure like a dam or bridge can have disastrous consequences, but organizations around the world will soon have a new monitoring tool at their disposal. NISAR, a new satellite mission developed by NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), will continuously scan the globe, tracking changes to Earth’s surface and providing insights that could help efforts to mitigate risks to dams, levees, bridges, and other critical infrastructure. Hear experts working in Nebraska, South Dakota, and West Virginia describe how they plan to use NISAR data to help keep local communities safer.
Short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, NISAR features two radar instruments: one from ISRO and one built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Together, the instruments will monitor motions of Earth’s surface down to fractions of an inch, along with changes in other properties of the surface such as roughness and moisture content. Beyond the potential for protecting infrastructure, the volumes of data from NISAR will deepen scientists’ understanding of deforestation, glacier and sea-ice loss, natural hazards, climate change, and other global vital signs.
NISAR is targeted for launch in 2025 from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India.
For more information on the NISAR mission, visit: https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/
Transcript
Cathleen Jones (Senior Research Scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory)
Infrastructure problems are common around the world.
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When critical infrastructure fails, the results can be disastrous. Can a new space mission help?
Cathleen Jones
NISAR is a new Earth-observing mission to image all of the land across the globe.
This is a partnership between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation.
The thing that's really cool about this instrument is that you can do interferometry – looking at how the surface is moving – so that you can tell where something might be going wrong. “Is this getting close to failure?” For example, if a landslide is slipping, and then put your ground attention on that point.
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CRW Yeager Airport, Charleston, WV
Allen Cadden (Principal, Schnabel Engineering)
In 2015, the airport had a major slope failure that created a huge interruption to their operations and damaged their safety overrun area. And then we designed the replacement wall at the end of the runway.
We have instrumentation in the wall. We'll be using NISAR to monitor the wall deformations and the surrounding area in the future.
Ben Webster (Schnabel Engineering)
So when we think about the application of NISAR to a project like this, how does that feed into the overall mitigation?
Allen Cadden
So I think the goal is to be able to use NISAR data as that early warning system. It'll give us an alert that something is starting to move, hopefully within plenty of time to take action to assess the problem and take remediation before it becomes a problem for a wall like this.
Cathleen Jones
This instrument is gonna give you an idea of what's happening over the whole system. So in the context of dams or levees, you can look at whether the slope of the dam is somehow shifting.
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Gavins Point Dam, Cedar County, NE & Yankton County, SD
Georgette Hlepas (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)
We're interested in NISAR data because it'll provide us a good amount of information on a variety of our projects.
We have over 700 dams in our inventory. We also have over 2000 miles of levee. So the Corps’ responsibility is to make sure that it's functional and keeping people safe downstream should a flood event occur.
The main purpose of our projects is for water supply, hydropower, and flood control. It's really difficult to monitor every point on every project. But NISAR will provide us good coverage of a lot of projects that are difficult to get to in remote areas that are very large. And we can use that to supplement our existing monitoring programs to see are there any areas that we need to look at more closely, add additional instrumentation – basically as a screening-level tool to see: are there areas that we should be looking at that we're not already?
Cathleen Jones
This is like the culmination of a dream to be able to have this instrument operating and providing this kind of data for everywhere, for everyone in the world.
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The NISAR mission is targeted to launch in 2025.