Summary
NASA-JPL says NISAR radar images captured the spread of lava from Russia’s Krasheninnikov volcano between December 2025 and August 2026. A 17-frame sequence shows the flow filling a crater and spreading across the surrounding landscape.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, or NISAR, recorded the changing lava field at Krasheninnikov, a volcano on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Images taken from December 2025 through mid-August 2026 were assembled into a 17-frame time-lapse showing lava spreading from the volcano’s northern crater.
The sequence offers repeated radar observations of an evolving volcanic landscape. JPL says this kind of consistent coverage could help scientists monitor natural hazards and may be useful for emergency response.
Radar images trace the lava’s spread
Krasheninnikov consists of two volcanoes and had been quiet since about 1550. On July 30, 2025, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck in the nearby ocean. JPL says the earthquake apparently jolted one of the volcanoes awake; Krasheninnikov began erupting a few days later, for the first time in nearly five centuries.
NISAR’s first image of the site was captured on Dec. 25, 2025, while the satellite was completing post-launch checks and becoming operational. Since then, it has observed the location on both south-to-north and north-to-south passes, described by JPL as twice every 12 days.
The time-lapse shows lava filling a smaller inner caldera, overflowing into a wider crater and then spreading into a fan-shaped field to the east. It also shows a flow to the northwest, which JPL says likely formed before NISAR’s first image of the volcano.
NISAR was about 464 miles (747 kilometers) above Earth when it captured the images. Each pixel represents an area of roughly 30 feet by 30 feet (10 meters by 10 meters). The lava appears brighter than the surroundings because it reflects microwaves differently from the surrounding surface, which is snow or bare ground depending on the season. This is a radar view of surface properties, not a direct measurement of lava temperature.
How NISAR’s radar works
Synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, uses radar pulses to observe Earth’s surface. NISAR sends microwave pulses and receives their echoes; processing combines observations of the same area to produce a sharper image. Because the instrument uses radar, it can collect information independently of visible-light conditions.
NISAR carries two radar instruments operating at different wavelengths: an L-band system and an S-band system. Their measurements are complementary. For example, the longer-wavelength L-band radar can see through tree canopies to image the ground beneath them, while S-band observations can capture aspects of the canopy, depending on leaf size.
The mission brings together NASA and ISRO. JPL leads the US component and provided the L-band radar and antenna reflector; ISRO provided the spacecraft bus and S-band radar. JPL says NISAR’s near-global land coverage, repeat observations and cloud-accessible data can support observations of many of the world’s active volcanoes. Its L-band data products are distributed through the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center.