Mumbai: At 5.40pm Wednesday, the Nasa-Isro Synthetic Aperture Radar (Nisar) satellite aboard Isro’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) -F16 rocket successfully lifted off from the second launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota. With a mission lifespan of five years, the first joint Earth observation satellite between Isro and Nasa will study the Earth’s ecosystems and natural hazards. GSLV-F16 mission is also the first mission with GSLV to Sun Synchronous Polar Orbit.
On Wednesday, a Nasa team was stationed alongside the Isro team at the launch facility, while another 20-member team from the US space agency was positioned at the Isro Telemetry Tracking and Command Network, which is the mission operations facility in Bengaluru.
“For the first time, Nasa and Isro have worked so closely together on a mission with both organisations providing major hardware contributions,” said Sue Owen, deputy chief scientist, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Nisar features S-band (3.2 GHz) radars built by Nasa and L-band radar (1.25 GHz) by Nasa, making it the world’s first dual-frequency radar imaging satellite to observe the Earth. Employing the novel SweepSAR technology, the 2,392-kilogram satellite will orbit 743kms above Earth, scanning the entire planet every 12 days with centimetre-level precision.
The $1.5 billion Nisar satellite, which has been in the making since a decade, can help in assessing natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides, and map Greenland’s & Antarctica’s ice sheets. The satellite’s data will also be used for sea ice classification, ship detection, shoreline monitoring, storm tracking, crop mapping, and changes in soil moisture—all of which are vital for governments, researchers, and disaster management agencies.
{{/usCountry}}The $1.5 billion Nisar satellite, which has been in the making since a decade, can help in assessing natural hazards such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides, and map Greenland’s & Antarctica’s ice sheets. The satellite’s data will also be used for sea ice classification, ship detection, shoreline monitoring, storm tracking, crop mapping, and changes in soil moisture—all of which are vital for governments, researchers, and disaster management agencies.
{{/usCountry}}The inception of Nisar can be traced back to the 2007 Earth Science Decadal Survey by the National Academy of Sciences, US, which identified the need to gain data and insight in three Earth science domains: ecosystems, deformation of Earth’s crust and cryospheric sciences.
Following the survey’s recommendation of a radar and a Large Aperture Receiver (LAR) mission to better radar capabilities for different science disciplines, Nasa approached Germany, Canada, Argentina, but were met with no success. In 2011, Nasa sent Paul Rosen, project scientist, Nisar mission, to Isro to discuss the concept of the mission.
“India said this is exactly the kind of thing we would like to do. Next, we needed to have a technology element to it. Because we already had this reflector feed design in the back of our minds as one of the trade options, somebody, I may be, suggested we could put two radars on this (reflector). They (Isro) could build one and we could build the other and they really resonated with that,” said Rosen at a pre-launch media conference last week. “That’s what formed Nisar.” In 2014, on his visit to the US, an agreement to support Nisar was sealed between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama.
Teams from both space agencies worked on building the satellite during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“During the height of the Covid, we had 65 engineers come out from Isro and visit JPL to keep the integration and tests going,” said Phil Burella, Nisar project manager. “Over the last 2 1/2 years, Nasa has sent over 175 engineers to Isro to keep integration and tests going, and get us ready for where we stand today and ready for launch.”
Data from the satellite will start coming in after completion of the 90-day commissioning period, and will be freely accessible to within a day or two of observation, and in near real-time in case of emergencies. Data from Nasa’s L-band instrument will be available at the Alaska Stellite Facility (ASF) and that from S-Band will be available on Bhoonidhi at the National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad.