Earlier this week, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) received the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) satellite from the US space agency NASA, “setting the stage for the final integration of Earth observation satellites,” tweeted the US Consulate in Chennai. This is a major milestone for the US-India space cooperation plan.
Final integration will be done at the UR Rao Satellite Center in Bengaluru and ISRO plans to launch the satellite from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota in 2024, according to the NASA website.
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What is Nisa?
Optimized for understanding Earth’s geography and managing natural resources, NISER is a low-Earth orbit observatory jointly developed by NASA and ISRO. Nisar is an acronym for the NASA-ISRO SAR mission, a collaboration between the two space agencies, which aims to provide information on Earth’s changing ecosystems and surface natural hazards, including ice-covered areas, and rising seas. layer
NASA will map the entire world in 12 days and provide spatially and temporally consistent data to better understand the effects of climate change on Earth. It is the first satellite mission to collect radar data in two microwave bandwidth regions, called L-band and S-band, and measure changes across less than a centimeter of Earth’s surface, the NASA website explains. According to ISRO, SAR works with the sweep SAR technique to provide high-resolution data. It can penetrate clouds and darkness, enabling Nisar to collect data throughout the day and throughout the year.
How can it help?
Human activity in high-risk areas prone to hazards such as sea-level change, land subsidence, tsunamis, volcanoes, earthquakes and landslides is causing thousands of deaths and costing billions of dollars annually. Better predictions—leading to improved mitigation—could help save the planet from such events. Nisar can track even subtle changes that will help improve disaster response.
Moreover, Nisar’s data will have open access, allowing policymakers around the world to “use them for scientific, social and commercial goals.” It will also store pre-disaster images that can be accessed to quickly understand how the disaster occurred. Development of “actionable applications” such as water resource monitoring.
A 2017 survey by the US National Academy of Earth Sciences, called the Earth Science Decadal Survey, outlined observing priorities for NASA for the next decade. One of the main objectives was to collect data and increase insights in three Earth science domains: ecosystems, crustal deformation, and cryospheric science. According to the US space agency, the ISRO-NASA partnership emerged in response to this survey.
On September 30, 2014, NASA and ISRO signed a partnership to collaborate and launch NISER. While NASA has brought “L-band synthetic aperture radar, a high-rate communications subsystem for science data, GPS receiver, a solid-state recorder and payload data subsystem”, according to its official website, ISRO is providing the “spacecraft bus”. , S-band radars, launch vehicles and associated launch services.”
In addition to monitoring natural resource use, and Earth’s changing land use, NASA will track changes in land movement that can detect and predict catastrophic events, determine how diverse biomass contributes to the global carbon budget, help better understand land use, SHED shed light on how climate and ice masses are linked and measure changes in permafrost and surface melting, track glacier flow rates and monitor groundwater changes in subsurface arid regions to provide insight into changes occurring below ground and their consequences.
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