Indo-US Earth Radar Mission: NISAR To Finally Lift-Off From Sriharikota On July 30
After a long delay, the much-anticipated Indo-US joint satellite mission, NISAR, is set to launch from Sriharikota at 5:40 pm on July 30, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) confirmed on Monday. The mission will deploy one of the largest and most advanced radar systems in space to provide an unprecedented view of the Earth.
The satellite will lift-off on a GSLV-F16 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, and inject it into a 743 km Sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination of 98.4 degrees.
Weighing nearly 2392 kg, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) has been developed jointly by scientists from ISRO as well as NASA. NISAR has been nearly a decade in the making, with scientists from both India and the United States meticulously developing the mission's two scientific payloads — even through the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. While NASA developed the L-band radar for longer-wavelength imaging, ISRO and the Space Applications Centre (SAC) in Ahmedabad built the complementary S-band radar.
It is the first satellite to observe the Earth with a dual frequency synthetic aperture radar both using NASA's 12-metre unfurlable mesh reflector antenna integrated to ISRO's modified 13K satellite bus.
The powerful satellite will observe Earth with a swath of 242 km and provide high-resolution imagery using SweepSAR technology for the first time, said the space agency. It will scan the entire globe and provide all weather, day and night data at an interval of 12 days. It can even detect small changes in the Earth's surface, any deformation, movement of ice sheets and loss of vegetation.
According to the space agency, NISAR will enable a wide range of applications, and help in studies which require classification of sea ice, monitoring of shorelines, changes in soil moisture, mapping and monitoring of surface water resources, as well as characterising storms, and detecting ships in the sea. This will also help in streamlining early disaster response, said ISRO.
Initially scheduled for an early 2024 launch, the mission has faced multiple delays after one of its components had to be sent back to the US for corrections.
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