NISAR satellite

• Scientists and engineers involved in the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission have completed key tests including the thermal vacuum testing ahead of its launch which is scheduled to take place in the first quarter of 2024.

ABOUT NISAR

• NISAR is a Low Earth Orbit observatory jointly developed by NASA and ISRO which is expected to be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota onboard ISRO’s GSLV Mark-II launch vehicle.
• The $1.5-billion NISAR’s mission life is for three years.
• The satellite will survey all of earth’s land and ice-covered surfaces every 12 days and this starts after a 90 day satellite commissioning period.
• NISAR carries L and S dual-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), which operates with the Sweep SAR technique to achieve large swaths with high-resolution data.
  • The SAR payloads mounted on Integrated Radar Instrument Structure (IRIS) and the spacecraft bus are together called an observatory.
• Collaboration
  • NASA’s JPL is providing the mission’s L-band SAR. NASA is also providing the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem.
  • ISRO’s U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru is providing the spacecraft bus, the S-band SAR electronics, the launch vehicle, and associated launch services and satellite mission operations.
• NISAR data will help researchers monitor a wide range of changes in unprecedented detail which includes spotting warning signs of imminent volcanic eruptions, helping monitor the effects of groundwater use such as land subsidence, tracking the melt rate of ice sheets tied to sea level rise and observing shifts in the distribution of vegetation around the earth.