More Than a Year After First Surveying the Destructive Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, Nasa Has Sent Its Data-Collecting Drone UAVSAR

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Nasa sends UAV back to explore explosive Hawaiian volcano

SCIENCE (/SCIENCE) / 05 APRIL 11 / by MARK BROWN (/SEARCH/AUTHOR/MARK+BROWN)

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More than a year after first surveying the destructive Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, Nasa has sent its data-collecting drone UAVSAR back (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm? KONA HELICOPTER release=2011-105) to the Big Island to assess how it shaped ADVENTURE and shifted the Earth's surface.

In January 2010, researchers at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010- 10/22/mars-rover-curiosity-cam) in California sent the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic ApertureU Radar aircraft

over the volcano every day for a week. TheNASA radar,Earth Observatory which is nestled in a pod beneath the Gulfstream-III aircraft's belly, sends pulses of microwave energy at the ground to measure subtle deformations in Earth's surface.

A lot has happened to the area in that time. In November 2010 and again in January 2011, homes near the Kalapana Gardens were engulfed in lava flows. Throughout March 2011, an explosive fissure eruption (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-04/16/icelandic- volcano%E2%80%99s-ash-plume-as-seen-from-space) occurred along the east rift zone, spitting out molten rocks and blanketing the landscape with lava. Nasa will now repeat its previous journey, mimicking the 2010 flight paths to an accuracy of five metres. "The April 2011 UAVSAR flights will capture the March 2011 fissure eruption surface displacements at high resolution and from multiple viewing directions, giving us an improved resolution of the magma (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-03/14/earth-core-fluctuations) injected into the east rift zone that caused the eruption," said JPL research scientist Paul Lundgren.

By comparing the images taken more than a year apart, volcanologists at Nasa can create interferograms to reveal exactly how the Earth's surface changed, giving fresh insight into the volcano's power. The nine-day research flight started on 3 April.

The agency has previously used the UAVSAR technology to measure the temperate ice caps of Iceland (http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=31642) and the boreal forests (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa-jpl/3878819639/) of Canada in 2009, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill READ NEXT (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/oilspill/pia13233.html) and the Haiti earthquakes (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-037) in 2010.(/news/archive/2015-07/08/wired-awake-8- WIRED AWAKE july) ! " # $ % &WIRED Awake: 10 must- 5 shares read articles for 8 July 0 comments (/news/archive/2015- Edited by DUNCAN GEERE 07/08/wired-awake-8- $ START THE CONVERSATION tjuly)

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