The earthquake registered 3.6 on the Richter scale, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the agency that monitors quakes around the U.S. USGS reported that the quake occurred Friday, July 16, 2010 at 5:04:47 a.m. EDT.

The quake originated 5 kilometers (3.1 miles) deep and it was centered at 39.167 degrees North, 77.252 degrees West, in Germantown, Md. That latitude and longitude positions the quake's epicenter just west of Interstate 270 and south of Maryland state route 119.

The USGS noted that the epicenter was 15 km (10 miles) northwest of Rockville, Md., 30 km (15 miles) east-northeast of Leesburg, Va., 35 km (20 miles) northwest of Washington, D.C., and 70 km (45 miles) west-northwest of Annapolis, Md.

Although earthquakes are monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA conducts research in various earthquake projects. That research is done in earthquake country, however, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., just outside of Los Angeles. NASA measures, computes, and models crustal deformation using GPS and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) from its airborne unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) SAR platform and international satellites.

"Crustal deformation occurs both as a result of earthquakes and quietly," said Andrea Donnellan, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. and a research professor at the University of Southern California and NASA's Applied Sciences Program Area Co-Lead for Natural Disasters.

"The quiet or aseismic motions provide insight into the processes that produce earthquakes. GPS data provide daily precise positions of points or stations on the ground, which in turn provide a detailed time history of crustal deformation and changes. InSAR provides regional images of crustal deformation."

NASA funds several projects that integrate the GPS and InSAR data into models that provide insight into fault activity and earthquake potential, and Donnellan is the Principal Investigator of NASA's QuakeSim project, as well as supercomputing, earthquake modeling, and UAVSAR projects.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the quake was too small for NASA to detect. The last earthquake in the region occurred in May of 2008 and was even smaller, registering a magnitude of 2.0 on the Richter Scale.

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