NISAR’s View of Mount Rainier

This image captured by the US-India NISAR Earth satellite on November 10, 2025 shows Mount Rainier in Washington. The image is cropped from a much larger swath covering the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR’s L-band SAR instrument is capable of observing through clouds at the surface.

In images of the northwest Pacific from the NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar mission, some areas are dotted with magenta due to the strong reflection of radar signals off flat surfaces like roads and buildings, combined with the orientation of those surfaces relative to the satellite’s ground track. Yellow can be produced by a range of different factors, including land cover, humidity and surface geometry. Yellow-green in imagery usually indicates vegetation, such as forests and wetlands covering the area.

Relatively smooth surfaces, including water and, as is likely in this image, unvegetated clearings at the top of the mountain, appear dark blue. Near the base of the mountain are patches of purple squares cut into the lighter green vegetation. Their precise right angles show that they are clearly artificial; they are probably due to forest thinning or vegetation regrowing after being thinned in the past.

A joint mission developed by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), NISAR was launched in July 2025 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center on the southeastern coast of India. Managed by Caltech, JPL is leading the U.S. component of the project and provided the satellite’s L-band SAR and antenna reflector. ISRO provided the NISAR spacecraft bus and its S-band SAR.)

The NISAR satellite is the first to carry two SAR instruments at different wavelengths and will monitor Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days, collecting data using the spacecraft’s giant drum-shaped reflector, which is 39 feet (12 meters) wide – the largest radar antenna reflector NASA has ever sent into space.

To learn more about NISAR, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/nisar/