WISE is an airborne sounder designed to measure the nadir ice thickness of warmer and fractured glacier. Its design is based on a successful planetary sounder MARSIS that enables scientist to discover layered water-ice deposits near Mars poles.
The airborne sounder uses 15-300 meter long wavelengths in order to penetrate into rough surfaces, voids, and cracks before they are reflected by the interface between ice and bedrock. This makes the system well suited for the study of outlet glaciers whose internal structures are very complicated due to fast-moving surfaces and proximity to a relatively warm body of ocean.
Such an investigation will provide us with valuable information such as ice stratigraphy and the ground slope of the bedrock layer as well as ice thickness, which is very important to construct a reliable ice-flow model.