NASA Imagery Aids Japanese Response to Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Events

Terra is a multi-national, multi-disciplinary satellite mission involving partnerships with the aerospace agencies of Canada and Japan. Managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the mission also receives key contributions from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Langley Research Center. The Terra spacecraft houses five major instruments; three of these – ASTER, MODIS and MISR – have been actively supporting the process of visualizing the disaster in Japan. Together with commercial and international satellite images, Terra instruments are measuring and visualizing earthquake and tsunami damage, and may even provide visualization of heat created by the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors.

In addition to satellite-based imagery, NASA is also developing computer models using real-time GPS data to predict and manage events such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Y. Tony Song and his colleagues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in collaboration with scientists from University of Nevada at Reno, are now in the process of completing a prototype system to predict the movement and size of a tsunami. The Global Differential GPS system, managed by JPL, combines global and regional real-time data from a network of hundreds of GPS sites and estimates their positions every second. According to a JPL press release, “It can detect ground motions as small as a few centimeters…. [Following last year's Chilean quake], researchers used real-time data from the agency’s Global Differential GPS (GDGPS) network to successfully predict the size of the resulting tsunami.”