NASA says it will study the earthquake faults around Haiti using a jet equipped with an airborne radar system A NASA Gulfstream III jet with the radar equipment aboard left the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave Desert on Monday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Tuesday.

The instrument, called the Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, is intended to the installed on pilotless drone aircraft, but is being demonstrated on a conventional jet for this mission. The overflights of Hispaniola, the island where Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located, were added to a previously scheduled three-week radar mission to Central America.

NASA added the mission to Haiti and the Dominican Republic after the 7.0-magnitude quake that devastated Haiti on Jan. 12. "UAVSAR will allow us to image deformations of Earth's surface and other changes associated with post-Haiti earthquake geologic processes, such as aftershocks, earthquakes that might be triggered by the main earthquake farther down the fault line, and the potential for landslides," said JPL's Paul Lundgren, the principal investigator for the Hispaniola mission.

The island lies over a complex system of faults, including the boundary between the small Caribbean plate and the enormous North American plate, which covers all of North America, Greenland, and parts of Russia, Japan and Iceland.

JPL has been using the radar system since November to study California's geologic fault lines. The mission to Central America will also study the structure of tropical forests, monitor volcanoes and examine Mayan archeology sites.

The UAVSAR, located in the jet's belly, sends pulses of microwave energy to the ground from an altitude of 12,500 metres to measure small changes in the Earth's surface, caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides or the movements of glaciers.