Washington - Nasa plans to conduct flights over earthquake faults in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to capture radar images that could be studied for warning signs of further temblors.
Nasa said a Gulfstream III jet equipped with a synthetic aperture radar would be used for the flights, which were being added to a three week scientific mission to study Central America's rainforests, volcanoes and Mayan ruins.
The radar "will allow us to image deformations of Earth's surface and other changes associated with post-Haiti earthquake geologic processes", said Paul Lundgren of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"Because of Hispaniola's complex tectonic setting, there is an interest in determining if the earthquake in Haiti might trigger other earthquakes at some unknown point in the future," he said.
Hispaniola is the Caribbean island that Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic.
Nasa has used the airborne radar before to observe the San Andreas fault in California. - AFP