India To Launch $1.5 Billion Joint Earth Mission With NASA In July
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India To Launch $1.5 Billion Joint Earth Mission With NASA In July
NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) will launch in July. It will be the world’s first Earth-observing satellite with dual-frequency radar, L-band and S-band. High-resolution imagery and insights it collects will be made freely available to scientists, agencies, and governments across the globe. NISAR will aid disaster response, climate research, and sustainable farming worldwide. It can also track soil moisture, helping farmers improve irrigation and boost crop yields.
Jointly developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ISRO’s Space Applications Centre, NISAR is the world’s first Earth-observing satellite equipped with dual-frequency radar, L-band and S-band. Using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, it will actively beam radar signals to Earth and analyse the reflections to create high-resolution images. Unlike optical satellites that depend on sunlight and clear skies, NISAR can capture data day or night, and even “see” through cloud cover, smoke, or dense vegetation.
What sets NISAR apart is its commitment to open data. The high-resolution imagery and insights it collects will be made freely available to scientists, agencies, and governments across the globe.
This technology makes it a powerful tool for tracking natural disasters, changes in groundwater, agricultural patterns, forest biomass, and the shifting of tectonic plates. It can even detect ground shifts as small as a few millimetres, making it vital for monitoring earthquakes, landslides, glacier melt, dam subsidence, coastal erosion, and forest biomass.
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It can also track soil moisture, helping farmers improve irrigation and boost crop yields. With wide-ranging uses, NISAR will aid disaster response, climate research, and sustainable farming worldwide.
The NISAR mission has been under development for over a decade, with joint engineering efforts led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and ISRO’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad.
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NISAR is now being prepped for its July launch aboard an ISRO GSLV Mark II rocket. Before this, it went through months of integration and rigorous testing at ISRO’s Bengaluru facility, where engineers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ISRO worked closely since March 2023.