A newly released image from the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite has captured the imagination of scientists and the public alike, revealing what looks like a massive hummingbird soaring over East Antarctica. But, as with many things in science, there’s more to this story than meets the eye: the “bird” is actually an intricate radar portrait of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, a mountaintop jutting through the Antarctic ice.
Radar Unveils Hidden Antarctic Features
The image, generated using NISAR’s L-band radar, is no ordinary photograph. Instead of visible light, NISAR sends out powerful microwaves—specifically, radar waves with horizontal polarisation—and measures how they bounce back from the ice and rock below. The result is a vivid, color-coded map where each hue reveals a different physical property. For example, what looks like a hummingbird’s dark belly is actually the rocky summit of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja, while the “tail” is a river of ice flowing northeast towards the ocean. The “feathers,” which fan out from the mountaintop, are crevasses formed as the glacier fractures around the rock.
Seongsu Jeong, the signal analysis engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who produced the image, explained that radar’s unique ability to peer beneath snow and deep into the ice provides scientists with insights that traditional optical cameras simply can’t deliver. “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,” Jeong said.
Public Data Unlocks New Research Possibilities
The image was released as part of NISAR’s system tests, a collaboration between NASA and India’s ISRO. As of July 20, the public now has access to data from NISAR’s two advanced radar instruments—the L-band and S-band—enabling researchers worldwide to track the movement of Earth’s land and ice masses, monitor forests and wetlands, and even respond to hazards like landslides and earthquakes.
NASA emphasized that while the magenta and green colors are not representative of the ice’s true color, they help scientists—and now the public—decode the hidden structure of the ice and rock. The sharp green “feather” patterns, for instance, mark deep crevasses where the glacier is under stress.
This “hummingbird illusion” is more than just a pretty picture; it’s a testament to the precision and power of modern radar imaging. As climate change accelerates shifts in Antarctica’s vast ice sheets, tools like NISAR will be crucial for understanding how these remote landscapes are changing—and for sharing those discoveries with the world.
