NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported on Sept. 24 that the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission has been tracking the eruption of Krasheninnikov, a volcano pair on the Pacific coast of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula. According to the agency, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck the nearby ocean on July 30, 2025, and apparently jolted one of the volcanoes awake; a few days later, Krasheninnikov began erupting for the first time in nearly five centuries.

NISAR captured an image of the volcano on Dec. 25, 2025, as the satellite was completing post-launch checks and becoming operational. Since then, it has returned to the same spot twice every 12 days, once passing south to north and again north to south. Researchers sequenced 17 frames captured through mid-August into a time-lapse video showing lava filling a smaller inner caldera, overflowing into a wider crater and widening into a fan, with another flow visible to the northwest.

Each pixel in the frames represents about a 30-foot-by-30-foot (10-meter-by-10-meter) square of surface. Matthew Pritchard, a NISAR science team member and geophysicist at Cornell University, said the consistency of twice-per-12-day acquisitions in two directions shows the mission's promise for closely monitoring natural hazards. JPL leads the U.S. component of the mission; ISRO provided the spacecraft bus and S-band radar.