NASA-ISRO’s NISAR mission targeted for launch in 2023; know all about it

American space agency NASA announced that its joint mission with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) 'NISAR' will be launched no earlier than early 2023. Under this mission, the agencies will launch a spacecraft into the low-Earth orbit to study the changes in our planet's atmosphere at a high resolution. According to NASA, the Earth-observing mission was agreed upon by the agencies on September 30, 2014, as part of the National Academy of Science’s decadal survey. Currently, in the assembling phase, the NISAR spacecraft will soon be moved for testing.

What is the NISAR mission?

(Illustration of NISAR satellite; Image: NASA)

An acronym for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), the mission will be launched to measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses and gain information about biomass, natural hazards, sea-level rise, and groundwater. According to NASA, the satellite will be installed at an altitude of 747 km and have a baseline lifespan of three years. During the course of the mission, the satellite will observe Earth's land and ice-covered surfaces globally with 12-day regularity and will sample the planet on an average of every six days. 

The satellite will basically scan the world's most hazard-prone areas and provide a treasure trove of data to help governments prepare for the disastrous events that once transpired in those areas. "Water resource monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and other value-added applications will also be revolutionized by access to these data", NASA says. Agricultural monitoring and characterization, landslide studies, Himalayan glacier studies, soil moisture, coastal processes, and coastal winds are the major objectives targeted by the agencies. The satellite data would also reveal information about the evolution and state of Earth's crust and the changing climate in the polar regions. 

Notably, NISAR will be the first satellite mission to use two different radar frequencies (L-band and S-band) to measure changes in our planet's surface less than a centimeter across. As a result of the collaboration, NASA is providing the satellite's L-band synthetic aperture radar, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder and payload data subsystem. ISRO, on the other hand, is providing the spacecraft bus, the S-band radar, the launch vehicle and associated launch services.