VAWS – Introducing NISAR: NASA’s Biggest Earth Observation Mission

Speaker: Franz Meyer, Professor, UAF Geophysical Institute, Chief Scientist, Alaska Satellite Facility

About the webinar: Some of the recent earthquakes in Alaska and across the globe showed us how violently Earth can sometimes move under our feet. In July 2025, NASA, in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organization, launched the NISAR satellite mission that will allow us to monitor such events at unprecedented accuracy, helping us better understand many of the natural hazards that affect Alaskans daily.

NISAR will revolutionize how we monitor Earth. It will be able to monitor volcanoes, glaciers, sea ice, forests, and seismic zones independent of weather and daylight conditions. NISAR’s instruments will be able to measure movements of Earth down to a centimeter accuracy, an incredible feat for a sensor orbiting more than 800 kilometers away. NISAR will collect more free-and-open data than NASA currently holds in all of its archives.

In addition to an overview of NISAR itself, this talk will also highlight Alaska’s important role in this mission. Working closely with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UAF’s Alaska Satellite Facility downlinks, archives, and distributes NISAR’s data to an international audience of scientists and decision-makers, all right here from Alaska. Supported by its talented local staff, this will make ASF one of the world’s leading data centers.

Bio: Meyer has more than 25 years of experience in the theory and application of radar remote sensing. He has been teaching radar remote sensing-related topics since 2000. He has been the PI of several successful research projects funded by NASA, NGA, private industry, and the European Union. Meyer has published more than 150 publications, five of which received best paper awards. He was awarded the IEEE GRSS GOLD Early Career award in 2011, the Terris and Katrina Moore Prize in 2014, a NASA/USAID SERVIR Collaboration Award in 2019, the IEEE GRSS Education Award in 2024, and the Emil Usibelli Distinguished Research Award in 2025. He holds chair or Co-Chair positions in IEEE GRSS, ISPRS, IGS, and EarthScope. He is the Chief Scientist of the Alaska Satellite Facility, a current Science Team Member of the NASA-ISRO SAR mission NISAR, and a Project Science Team member of the JPL OPERA project.