
Nisar, $1.5billion Indo-US mission enters last leg, Isro eyes July-end launch
BENGALURU: As Shubhanshu Shukla recuperates from his mission to space, enabled by a collaboration between India and the US, the next joint effort by the two countries — the Nasa-Isro
Synthetic Aperture Radar
(Nisar) mission — has entered its last leg with launch expected by the end of July from India's spaceport in Sriharikota.
Nisar, which has been in the works for more than a decade, will cost around $1.5 billion, making it the most expensive satellite mission the world has executed so far. Isro chairman V Narayanan, in an exclusive with TOI said both the satellite and the launch vehicle are at the spaceport and a series of final reviews will get underway this week.
The Earth-observing satellite, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between
Nasa
and Isro, carries an advanced radar system that will help protect communities by providing a dynamic, three-dimensional view of Earth in unprecedented detail and detecting the movement of land and ice surfaces down to the centimetre.
'The preparations are in full swing. We will be carrying out extensive reviews before we are confident of announcing a final date, but as things stand we are targeting the end of July,' Narayanan said. Nisar will be the first radar of its kind in space to systematically map Earth, using two different radar frequencies — L-band developed by Nasa's Jet Propulsion System (JPL) and S-band by Isro. SAR refers to a technique for producing fine-resolution images from a resolution-limited radar system.
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Aside from the payload on the satellite, Narayanan reiterated that the satellite itself was built by Isro and that the launch will happen on an Indian launch vehicle, the GSLV-MK2.
'In that sense, this partnership is different from what we've had in the past. Like I've told you earlier, strength respects only strength and in this mission the fact that we are equal partners shows how Isro and India have grown,' Narayanan said.
'Nisar will use SAR to scan nearly all the planet's land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. Each system's signal is sensitive to different sizes of features on Earth's surface, and each specialises in measuring different attributes, such as moisture content, surface roughness, and motion,' Nasa said.
The satellite will provide spatially and temporally consistent data for understanding changes in Earth's ecosystems, ice mass, vegetation biomass, sea-level rise, groundwater and natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and landslides.
TOI first reported about Isro and Nasa working on a dual-radar satellite as early as in Nov 2013, and nearly a year later, On Sept 30, 2014, the two space agencies signed a formal partnership to collaborate on and launch Nisar.
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Time of India
27 minutes ago
- Time of India
Unique space radar will track earth's every shake & shift
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So, an agreement was made: The US would supply its ATS-6 telecommunications satellite for a test run; India would build the ground infrastructure. The experiment was a success. SITE reached around 2 lakh people, helped train 50,000 science teachers in primary schools and beamed advice to thousands of farmers, becoming 'the largest sociological experiment in the world'. Before SITE, India and US had worked together in space for close to a decade, but this was the first time their efforts touched lives. 50 years apart 'It took 50 years from one major joint project in communications and broadcasting to another project on Earth observation,' former Isro deputy director Arup Dasgupta, who led deployment of SITE's receivers, told TOI. He said Nisar's launch showed how much Isro had progressed. 'Fifty years ago, we used a Nasa satellite to beam educational programmes. Today, we are launching their payload along with our own Synthetic Aperture Radar on an Indian launcher.' 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In disaster-prone areas, Nisar's interferometric accuracy will boost early detection, measuring ground shifts over wide regions. It will even aid during oil spills. 'This will be the first mission between US and India to observe Earth in such a detailed way,' said Nicola Fox, associate administrator, Nasa science mission directorate. Roots in 1978 Nisar's roots go back to a breakthrough launch in 1978, when Nasa put in orbit Seasat — the world's first satellite with SAR. The mission lasted only 105 days, but the data this satellite produced reshaped Earth observation. Now, nearly 50 years after Seasat, Nisar is set to go up and stay there for at least three years, generating more data daily than any other previous remote-sensing satellite. For India, which will handle its launch, the satellite deepens its scientific engagement with the world. For Nasa, it extends an Earth observation legacy. 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