NASA and ISRO Open First Broad Release of Calibrated NISAR Radar Data

Public access to processed radar data from NISAR, the joint NASA-India Earth-observation satellite, began July 20, marking the first broad release of calibrated products from the mission’s two radar instruments. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Tuesday that outside users can now obtain data from both the satellite’s U.S.-built L-band radar and its Indian S-band radar.

The release is significant because it moves NISAR beyond earlier sample distributions and into substantive public access for researchers studying changes in land and ice. On the U.S. side, NASA has begun continuously releasing calibrated L-band provisional products for all L-band measurements collected since June 17, 2026. Those data are being hosted by the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. The archive classifies the July 20 release as provisional, meaning the products are fully calibrated and partially validated, replace earlier beta products, and could be reprocessed later. ASF documentation says validated reprocessing is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. On the Indian side, ISRO’s Bhoonidhi portal has begun releasing S-band products, with the site saying daily processed data collections from July 8 onward are available.

That shift gives outside scientists much more usable material from a mission designed to monitor how Earth’s land and ice surfaces move and change at near-global scale. Earlier releases in January and February 2026 were sample beta data meant to help users test workflows and were not fully calibrated.

As a showcase of what the mission can reveal, NASA highlighted an early radar image from East Antarctica featuring a formation that resembles a hummingbird. The image shows Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountain peak protruding through glacier ice, and was generated from L-band measurements gathered in August 2025 during testing and commissioning. NASA said the magenta, green and white colors reflect differences in radar polarization and scattering, helping expose crevasses and fractured ice around the nunatak.

“First, it’s a beautiful image, with rich details of features that provide insights to how the glacier is moving. Then, because radar can often see through snow and deep into the ice, NISAR can observe fundamentally different properties of Antarctic ice than can be seen in optical imagery,” said Seongsu Jeong, a signal analysis engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “With NISAR we’re seeing what’s hidden beneath the surface.”

NISAR, short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, launched July 30, 2025. The satellite carries a NASA/JPL L-band synthetic aperture radar and an ISRO S-band synthetic aperture radar, using a 39-foot, or 12-meter, deployable reflector. NASA says the mission produces science data on the order of dozens of terabytes a day. From an orbit that scans from within a few degrees of the South Pole to 77.5 degrees north latitude, NISAR is designed to cover nearly all of Earth’s land and ice surfaces, with a reference observing strategy that images them twice every 12 days.