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Some Nancy Grace Roman-ology: the great woman immortalized in Lego form. And an example of one of the mirrors on the telescope that bears her name.

Nancy Grace Roman – NASA's first Chief Astronomer and apparently a knitter – rendered in Lego

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This is the largest clean room of its type, it fills the whole building! Seems a little empty right now – only thing they were working on there today was the aforementioned Dragonfly. But they assembled the Nancy Grace Roman telescope in there and are rightly very proud of it!

A big, empty clean room, just the thing for assembling a big space telescope. Or a small quadcopter.

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A couple of toys for @markpanning.seismology.space, I think? One of the LEMS lunar seismometers, in for testing, before Artemis takes it to the Moon. And the Dragonfly drone (allegedly) under some kind of anti-static blanket, being prepped for its eventual flight off to Titan.

A clean tent with (possibly) bits of the LEMS apparatus – the Lunar Environment Monitoring Station, basically a suitcase-sized seismometer to be deployed on the Moon by Artemis

The Dragonfly drone, allegedly, under an anti-static blanket in a clean room

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This is Integration and Testing – we got clean tents for instrument payload assembly, and a whole load of super heavy duty torture testing apparatuses for putting your spacecraft through the wringer before you let 'em go to space...

The Integration and Testing facility at Goddard – the tents are for sterile assembly of instruments, the blue tanks are vacuum ovens for imposing space-like conditions on your gear, to see if it can handle it

This is the Space Environment Simulator – a giant vacuum tank, with both ovens and liquid nitrogen cooling. They fit the whole Nancy Grace Roman telescope in there, satellite and all, pumped out all the air, then subjected it to alternating extreme cold and extreme hot conditions. Brutal!

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Another week, another NASA facility tour! (I am at the NASA Cryosphere/Geosphere PI meeting in Maryland...)

Sign saying "NASA Goddard Space Flight Center"

So all in all it was a great day – I learned a lot about potential uses of OPERA data products and got to see lots of cool things. And (importantly) I also got my hands on some NISAR merch! Thanks to the OPERA staff for the invite!

A NISAR mug, as can be purchased from the JPL store

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And one of the staff (Reynato) kindly offered to take three of us on a tour of the campus to show us all the cool things – the Mars Yard (with model of the Perseverance rover), the clean rooms used for assembly, mission control, the museum...

A model of the Perseverance rover being tested in the Mars Yard

The clean room where satellites and other mission platforms are assembled. On the right is ASTHROS, an infrared telescope that is launched on giant helium balloons

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I also got to meet a scale model of NISAR in the building lobby

NISAR (left, 1/6 scale) and me (right 1/1 scale)

The occasion was the OPERA Stakeholder Engagement Workshop, attended by ~20 people in person (pictured) and 200 online. OPERA is a NASA-funded project making value-added remote sensing data products operationally (surface displacement time series, surface disturbance, surface inundation and more)!

Some of the in-person attendees at the OPERA workshop. Marin Govorcin (white shirt, right) was presenting on NISAR displacement time series. Note the awesome view of the mountains from the window!

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My working life is not all about seeing donkeys on my way between my home and my office. Sometimes (yesterday) you get to visit someone else's campus and see what large mammals they have kicking around (JPL, mule deer)!

A concrete sign saying "JPL" (Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

Three mule deer chowing down on the undergrowth next to a loading bay

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 31/08/2026

Heading into work after a couple of Zoom meetings that I took at home, I was so lost in my thoughts that I nearly missed five donkeys seeking shade under a tree (and six more in the street)!

Donkeys under a tree from the other side of the tree

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In Palm Springs for the SCEC annual meeting, and once again I am seeing pictures of me on the screen (e.g. from Roland Bürgmann's keynote talk). Apparently I like to stand next to Roger Bilham

Photos of offset curbs, all sites of fault creep. Top left: Berkeley Memorial Stadium, top right: Camelia Drive in Fremont (with Roger Bilham and me for scale), bottom left: Rose St at Prospect St in Hayward, bottom right: I think that is the Calaveras fault in Hollister, CA.

A slide titled "Creepmeters". In the left panel, several people (closest to camera: me, second closest: Roger Bilham) are standing by a hole in the ground – an equipment vault at Gallegos Winery that contains a creepmeter.

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 27/08/2026

Working from home today. The sound of braying from the park across the street was just about audible over the noise of my (overtaxed) air conditioner. (Optical zoom on my new phone seems to work well!)

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 03/08/2026

It's that time of year again - the EarthScope ISCE+ course in InSAR processing and analysis is underway! Here (on his short course debut) is Francisco Delgado leading us through a first modeling exercise using InSAR displacements over Okmok Volcano!

View of the OpenScienceLab screen, showing two versions of an interferogram of Okmok Volcano in Alaska. Francisco Delgado (webcam snapshot on the right) is leading the session.

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 03/08/2026

We just got in from running errands, and this chap marches up to me as if demanding nose scritches (happily administered) and then settled in to munch on some of the excess grass outside our house.

Donkey standing in the middle of the street, heading straight towards me

Donkey dealing with some excess grass in my front yard

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 01/08/2026

If a good day is a day when I have seen a donkey, today is a day when I saw at least seventeen

At least 17 donkeys, some big, some little, in the park across the street from my house

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 25/06/2026

Composite plot of the two coseismic interferograms (Sentinel-1, from Copernicus) with the USGS epicenters of the two earthquakes and faults from GEM. The shoreline San Sebastián fault lines up with the fringes in the west and is probably the fault responsible.

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 25/06/2026

Another interferogram (Sentinel-1, descending track) covering the bulk of the rupture. The fact that you see essentially (the southern) half of the displacement pattern, indicates that the fault was offshore, or close to it. The noisiness is due to the tropical vegetation in-region.

A noisy interferogram of the 2026 Venezuela earthquakes. The fringe gradient is highest by the coast, and dies away to the south.

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 25/06/2026

It's taken me a while, but here is my first interferogram of the Venezuela earthquakes from Sentinel-1. It's an ascending track to the west of the epicenter, and the pattern of displacements is consistent with slip on a fault that runs close to and parallel to the coast.

Interferogram of the earthquakes in Venezuela. Shows the western extent of the rupture, and that the earthquake was likely on an E-W striking fault.

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 20/06/2026

Went to the salt mines outside of Kraków yesterday and thought I'd model good technique

Me licking the wall of the salt mine. Conclusion: salty

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Cristian Rossi (ESA): Hydroterra+ is a geostationary SAR concept proposed to the ESA Earth Explorer 12 opportunity. The goal is to track land water (and water vapor) changes on sub-daily timescales in Europe and Africe. Sounds like it would be capable of measuring precursory deformation too!

Slide describing the Geostationary Synthetic Aperture Radar concept as proposed in the Hydroterra+ concept

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Paco Lopez Dekker (TU Delft): The Harmony mission will involve two co-flying passive receivers that will fly ahead of and behind Sentinel-1, allowing bistatic InSAR, and to resolve the along-track component of displacements (and 3D displacements!) Planned for launch in 2029!

Slide showing the Harmony observation concept for measuring stereo phase

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Julia Kubanek (ESA) again: Sentinel-1 NG (next generation) will have an enhanced swath (400 km). Pixel size will be 25 m^2 and it will have along-track interferometry capability. With Sentinel-1 and ROSE-L it will make a complementary 'system of systems'. Launching in 2034 or so. Sounds awesome!

Slide showing the Copernicus SAR 'System of Systems' concept with Sentinel-1 First Generation, ROSE-L and Sentinel-1 Next Generation, and their respective imaging capabilities

Julia Kubanek (ESA): The ROSE-L mission will be Copernicus' L-band mission, and follows a similar philosophy to Sentinel-1 (2 satellites, 12 day orbits, 6 day repeats). Resolution will be 50 m^2. The first satellite will launch in 2030 or so.

Slide on the mission requirements and application needs of ROSE-L.

FRINGE 2026, day 2: Still zombified by jetlag, shotgunning coffee to stay conscious. Also, through some kind of black magic, someone has cut the auditorium in half, which is not doing wonders for my grasp on reality! We're starting with ESA future mission concepts this morning...

The auditorium at Jagellonian University, yesterday

The auditorium at Jagellonian University today. It is half the size of yesterday!

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Olivia Paschall (Cornell): "Bad" pixels (pixels with high amplitude dispersion) in desert areas show more apparent uplift than "good" pixels. You can get a 2 mm/yr bias in uplift rates! Don't average good pixels with bad! Comparing VV and VH polarization time series can help find the bad pixels!

Maps of InSAR velocities in the Laguna Salada area in Mexico – good pixels show positive range change (subsidence). Bad pixels show uplift! The modal difference is 2 mm/yr of uplift!

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Nikeet Pandit (MDA): Compact-pol(arization) SAR uses a circular polarized transmit signal and dual-pol received, giving similar pol response to quad-pol, but without compromising bandwidth. You can select the best pol response for each pixel and get more and better persistent scatterers!

Persistent scatterers found using conventional fixed polarization InSAR over a rail line

Persistent scatterers found using the optimal polarization for each pixel over the same rail lines – you get many more of them

Yngvar Larsen (NORCE): We can use Sentinel-1 burst overlaps to estimate along-track displacements, but these only give you a 1.5 km stripe, separated by ~15 km of no data. If you include partially focused pixels, you can expand that to 8 km, and get a much clearer picture of those displacements.

Along-track displacements of the 2025 M7.8 Myanmar earthquake using the expanded burst overlap method – a pretty clear picture of the displacement field!

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Ramon Hanssen (TU Delft): Rather than detect anomalies in InSAR time series after something bad happens, we want to know in real time – i.e. if there is an instantaneous state change. They have developed a scheme to estimate it, and test the robustness of the assumed parameters. Interesting!

Test of the Instantaneous State InSAR (ISI) approach versus the post-event, batch style processing for a subsiding site in Amsterdam. If anything, the ISI time series agrees with the data better of the two

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Thomas Nagler (ENVEO): The 1-day orbital separation of S1C and S1D in the S1D commissioning phase was an opportunity to get coherent interferograms over ice streams! The signal is clear, coherence is high, and they can track changes in grounding lines from month to month.

Recent InSAR data from the Evans Ice Stream in West Antarctica. From left to right: A 6-day interferogram (S1C to S1A), which has so many fringes on the ice stream, it is decorrelated. Then a 1-day interferogram – you can identify all the fringes on the ice stream! Then the difference between two 1-day interferograms one month apart – you can see differences in the ice flow speed and the location of the grounding line!

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Mario Azcueta (ESA ESTEC): An along-track interferometry mode (transmit once, record twice) was tried during the S1C and S1D commissioning phases. It works! You can measure along-track component of ocean current velocity with a single data take. They hope to use this for Sentinel-1 next generation!

Results of along-track interferometry over the Agulhas Current in the Indian Ocean (off the SE coast of Africa) using Sentinel-1C with a modified data acquisition mode. Shown (from left to right) are the SLC, the coherence, the along-track interferometry (ATI) results from Sentinel-1C and a similar ATI result made from Radarsat-2 data, ten minutes later.

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Dirk Geudtner, ESA: The cal/val phases of Sentinel-1C and -1D achieved very high phase stability between images from each satellite and also in cross-comparisons between them (and with -1A). They were also able to make EW-mode SLCs and interferograms (5 subswaths, 400 km-wide swath), which is cool!

Details of Sentinel-1 EW (extra wide) mode interferometry. It was a successful demonstration, and it is not clear whether there are any plans to produce the SLC images you need to do this routinely. But they could!

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Nuno Miranda, ESA: The rearrangement of the Sentinel-1 constellation is underway. S1C is going to 'hop' in orbit back one day so that it will be six days apart from S1D. This should be completed by 24th June. Then (sobs) S1A is going to end it's operations on 29th June. End of an era!

Diagrams showing the current changes to the Sentinel-1 constellation. Left: the configuration from January to June 2026, with three satellites (S1A, S1C and S1D). Middle: the proposed movement of S1C. Right: the goal end state with just S1C and S1D, six days apart in orbit.

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Gareth Funning @gfun.earth · 14/06/2026

FRINGE 2026 is go! The premier scientific workshop for InSAR methods, results and science. Apparently they are not sure whether it is the 13th or 14th edition. But I have been coming to them since 2003 (as has Marcus Engdahl who made this slide) and wow I'm old!

Slide showing images and logos for all of the FRINGE workshops since 2003. The interferogram of the Bam earthquake seems to appear on a lot of them.

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(Yeah, I'm in Poland this week.) Just arrived in town and blundered into an event going on in the square. They had a nun up on stage saying dark things about addiction, drugs and schizophrenia, and then this lass bounds on and sings a breezy number about smiling and not taking things too seriously.

A youngish blonde woman in a pantsuit singing a song about being happy or some such, backed by a full band of folkish musicians