ASAR assists Antarctic rescue mission

This image was acquired by Envisat’s Advanced Aperture Radar (ASAR) on 31 July 2002, in support of rescue efforts in Antarctica. The ASAR wide swath image shows a 400 km stretch of the Antarctic Coast in Queen Maud Land. At this time of year, a belt of sea ice up to 1100 km wide surrounds the Antarctic Continent and its ice shelves and gives the sea in this image a textured grey appearance.

At the time of this acquisition, the supply ship Magdalena Oldendorff was sheltering in a bay known as Muskegbukta on the Eastern side of the Jutulstraumen Ice Tongue. Her location is visible on the very edge of this scene (marked in blue). The icebreaker Almirante Irizar’s course through the ice-infested waters is shown as a series of GPS location measurements, one of which was made within minutes of the acquisition (shown in yellow). She will continue to skirt the ice shelf until reaching safer waters in the vicinity of the Astrid Rise (longitude 12E, off the image) in order to make her return to Buenos Aires.

The Mühlig-Hofmann Mountains are visible in the bottom left corner. Glaciers flowing from the mountains feed the Fimbul Ice Shelf, visible as a bright white swath bordering the South Atlantic Ocean.

Technical Information:

Instrument: Advanced Syntetic Aperture Radar(ASAR)

Mode: Wide Swath

Date of Acquisition: 31 July 2002

Orbit number:2177

Orbit direction: Ascending
Polarisation: H-H
Resolution: 150 metres