May 11, 1995 New York City L
& C bands
This is radar image of the New York city metropolitan area.
The island of Manhattan appears in the center of the image. The
green-colored rectangle on Manhattan is Central Park.
This image was acquired by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-
band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/ X-SAR) aboard the space
shuttle Endeavour on October 10, 1994. North is toward the upper
right. The area shown is 75.0 kilometers by 48.8 kilometers (46.5
miles by 30.2 miles). The image is centered at 40.7 degrees north
latitude and 73.8 degrees west longitude. In general, light blue
areas correspond to dense urban development, green areas to moderately
vegetated zones and black areas to bodies of water.
The Hudson River is the black strip that runs from the left
edge to the upper right corner of the image. It separates New
Jersey, in the upper left of the image, from New York. The Atlantic
Ocean is at the bottom of the image where two barrier islands
along the southern shore of Long Island are also visible. John
F. Kennedy International Airport is visible above these islands.
Long Island Sound, separating Long Island from Connecticut, is
the dark area right of the center of the image. Many bridges are
visible in the image, including the Verrazano Narrows, George
Washington and Brooklyn bridges. The radar illumination is from
the left of the image; this causes some urban zones to appear
red because the streets are at a perpendicular angle to the radar
pulse. The colors in this image were obtained using the following
radar channels: red represents the L-band (horizontally transmitted
and received); green represents the L-band (horizontally transmitted,
vertically received); blue represents the C-band (horizontally
transmitted, vertically received). Radar images like this one
could be used as a tool for city planners and resource managers
to map and monitor land use patterns. The radar imaging systems
can clearly detect the variety of landscapes in the area, as well
as the density of urban development. Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C
and X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) is part of NASA's
Mission to Planet Earth. The radars illuminate Earth with microwaves,
allowing detailed observations at any time, regardless of weather
or sunlight conditions. SIR-C/X-SAR uses three microwave wavelengths:
L-band (24 cm), C-band (6 cm) and X-band (3 cm).
The multi-frequency data will be used by the international
scientific community to better understand the global environment
and how it is changing. The SIR-C/X-SAR data, complemented by
aircraft and ground studies, will give scientists clearer insights
into those environmental changes which are caused by nature and
those changes which are induced by human activity. SIR-C was developed
by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. X-SAR was developed by the
Dornier and Alenia Spazio companies for the German space agency,
Deutsche Agentur fuer Raumfahrtangelegenheiten (DARA), and the
Italian space agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), with the
Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fuer Luft und Raumfahrt e.v.(DLR),
the major partner in science, operations, and data processing
of X-SAR.
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