Steven De La Fuente

ALT Steven De La Fuente, a graduate research assistant at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California, produced the composite image shown here. It was made using high-quality, rapidly updated near-IR data from the satellite-data company Planet Labs and two sets of radar data collected by the Sentinel-1 satellites as part of the European Space Agency’s Earth observation program. The image shows North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear-science center as it looked in late February 2021. The vegetation in the surrounding rural countryside (green) strongly reflects the near-IR band of light and is thus easily separated visually from the bare mountainsides (pink, on the right) and the nuclear site’s buildings (pink, on the left), which produce a distinct polarization signature in the two radar bands used in the analysis.