UAF satellite facility to manage NASA data surge
University’s role in satellite linking dates to early ’90s Research and its supporting ser- vices is big business for the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and a major contributor to the regional economy. Systemwide, the University of Alaska attracts about $250 million yearly in support from external sources, mostly federal, that employs about 1,000. Most of this is in Fairbanks at the UAF, where the university’s Geophys- ical Institute, with its picturesque arrays of satellite antennas, has for decades played a major role in high-al - titude atmospheric research. What is less well-known is the work of the Geophysical Institute’s Alaska Satellite Facility, which since 1991 has served as a vital connection between Earth-observing satellites and users worldwide. With Alaska’s high-latitude location and a team of trained and experienced engineers and scientists, the Alaska Satellite Facility offers a range of ser - vices facilitating use of remote sensing in support of national and internation- al Earth science research, disaster re- sponse and commercial applications. Fairbanks has long been known as a site for satellite downlink services because of its northern location, which allows efficient access to satellites in polar orbits. These orbits allow fre- quent and effective coverage of the entire Earth surface and are preferred for many types of remote sensing over satellites in equatorial orbits. Now the launch in late July of NIS- AR, a synthetic aperture radar, or SAR satellite, from the India Space Research
cy’s Sentinel-1 satellite, the largest data volume currently from any of the satellites ASF holds in its archives. One petabyte equals 1 million giga- bytes. 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 haven’t seen before,” Meyer said. “We spent many years with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA thinking about how to make this dataset accessible to the community so that they can use it in a meaningful way. Everything we do these days is designed with this goal in mind.” Albright said Wednesday’s launch marks a new chapter in Earth science. “The launch and the satellite are tre- mendous technical achievements,” he said. “Now we wait for the data that we know will provide great advances in understanding our planet.”
current L-band missions, especially on a global scale,” said Franz Meyer, the Alaska Satellite Facility’s chief scien- tist. Meyer is also a member of the NIS- AR science team and a geophysics pro- fessor with the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics, specializing in remote sensing. The L-band radar will cover near- ly all of Earth’s land surfaces, glaciers and coastal regions twice every 12 days. NASA is providing this instru- ment, along with the GPS receivers, data recorder, and science communi- cations system. “It will have a massive scientif- ic impact, because it feeds into not just one science discipline but a whole range of them,” Meyer said. “It’s also massive in terms of the data volume.” NISAR will generate about 40 peta- bytes of data annually. That compares to the 2 petabytes ASF archives annu- ally from the European Space Agen-
ever, will provide more radar imagery and cover more surface area than oth- er satellites and is the first to use du - al-frequency synthetic aperture radar systems. The mission combines NA- SA’s L-band radar and ISRO’s S-band radar technology. The Alaska Satellite Facility is one of NASA’s 11 Distributed Active Archive Centers and has the task of archiving synthetic aperture radar data. It will ar- chive and distribute all NASA-collected L-band SAR data and some selected S-band SAR data acquired over the U.S. The Indian Space Research Organiza- tion has its own distribution center and will distribute all S-band SAR data. ASF is one of four facilities 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. “With NISAR we will be much bet- ter at describing how displacements evolve over time than is possible with
Photos Courtesy UAF
Organization’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre, adds a whole new dimension to work being done by the Geophysical Institute’s satellite facility. This joint venture is NASA’s first SAR satellite mission since 1978. Years of preparation have been done to en- sure that a flood of freely available data will be available worldwide through the Alaska Satellite Facility. “Most of what we’ve been working on for the past eight years is prepar- ing for NISAR,” Alaska Satellite Facili- ty Director Wade Albright said prior to the launch. “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 manipu- lating the data and more time actually working with the data is important.” NISAR focuses on how the plan- et’s surface changes from natural and human-related forces. The mission’s goal is to monitor and measure sur- face changes such as land subsidence, glacier and ice sheet movement, and shifts caused by earthquakes, volca- noes and landslides. It can provide an improved under- standing of sea level rise by monitor- ing the flow of glaciers and ice sheets into the ocean, though it won’t focus on the oceans. The satellite, the most advanced
— Tim Bradner
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