JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar captured this false-color composite image of the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the surrounding region on Jan. 27, 2010. Port-au-Prince is visible near the center of the image.
The large dark line running east-west near the city is the main airport. UAVSAR left NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., Jan. 25, 2010, aboard a modified NASA Gulfstream III aircraft on a three-week campaign that will also take it to Central America.
Shortly before 5 p.m. local time on Jan. 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck southern Haiti. The earthquake’s epicenter was about 25 kilometers west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, close to the west edge of this image. The large linear east-west valley in the mountains south of the city is the location of the major active fault zone responsible for the earthquake: the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault.
Satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar measurements show that the Jan. 12 earthquake ruptured a segment of the fault extending from the epicenter westward over a length of about 40 kilometers, leaving the section of the fault in this image unruptured.
The earthquake has increased the stress on this eastern section of the fault south of Port-au-Prince and the section west of the rupture. This has significantly increased the risk of a future earthquake, according to a recent report by the U.S. Geological Survey.
UAVSAR is a reconfigurable polarimetric L-band synthetic aperture radar specifically designed to acquire airborne repeat track SAR data for differential interferometric measurements.
The radar will eventually be flown aboard an uninhabited, remotely-piloted aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk.
The radar was built at JPL with funding by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office. UAVSAR is managed and operated by JPL under contract with NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.