This wonderfully written promising story takes its title from the first line of a famous poem by internationally acclaimed Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
Today is the birth anniversary of India’s ‘Satellite Man’ and former chairman of ISRO, Professor UR Rao. He left the United States in the mid-1960s to join his home country’s evolving space program. Soon after, he was put in charge of managing the country’s satellite development program.
From the successful launch of the first Aryabhata satellite in 1975, he led the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO) efforts with Dr. Satish Dhawan in the development of INSAT, communication satellites and IRS, remote sensing satellites and satellite launch vehicles. Less than two decades.
Fittingly, decades later, the Indo-US joint space project called NISAR (NASA, ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) is reaching its final stage ahead of its launch in 2024, with the arrival of instruments from the US at the UR Rao Satellite Centre. In Bangalore.
The payload of the NISAR Earth science mission consists of two radar systems, one built by NASA and the other by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The entire radar system flew from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to Bangalore on March 6.
Soon, teams at the Bangalore facility will assemble the radar systems into the satellite’s body, or bus, and run it through tests ahead of the three-year mission, according to NASA.
NISAR will be launched by ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark II rocket, which is scheduled to lift off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh in 2024. The satellite will be placed in a near polar Earth orbit.
Once operational, NISAR will be able to collect day and night measurements under all weather conditions, and its wealth of data will help researchers better understand a wide range of Earth science topics, including landslides, groundwater loss and the carbon cycle.
NISAR will feature the most advanced radar system ever launched on a NASA science mission. It will observe nearly all of Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days, measuring movements in minute detail. It will help study natural hazards, sea ice melting, groundwater supplies and more. It will also survey forests and agricultural areas to help scientists understand carbon exchange between plants and the atmosphere.
“This mission will be a powerful demonstration of radar’s capabilities as a science tool and will help us study Earth’s dynamic land and ice surfaces in greater detail than ever before,” Dr. Somanath, Chairman, ISRO observed recently.
NISAR’s payload will be the most advanced radar system launched as part of a NASA science mission. It will have the largest radar antenna of its kind: a drum-shaped, wire mesh reflector about 40 feet (12 meters) in diameter that will extend from 30-feet (9-meters).
The mission’s science instruments consist of L and S band radars, which indicate the wavelength of their signals. ISRO built the S-band radar, which it sent to JPL in March 2021. Engineers at the US center spent nearly two years integrating the instrument with the JPL-built L-band system, then conducted tests to verify that they worked well together.
In late February 2023, technicians and engineers working in a JPL clean room placed the science payload in a specially designed shipping container before loading it into a flatbed truck for the drive to March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, California. A US Air Force C-17 cargo plane flew it from there to Bangalore, touching down on 6 March.
NISAR is the first collaboration between NASA and ISRO on an Earth-observing mission. JPL, which is operated for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, leads the US component of the project and provides the mission’s L-band SAR. NASA is also providing radar reflector antennas, deployable booms, a high-rate communications subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystems.
ISRO on the other hand is providing spacecraft buses, S-band SAR, launch vehicles and associated launch services and satellite mission operations.
On September 30, 2014, NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden and ISRO Chairman, K Radhakrishnan signed a partnership to first collaborate and launch NISAR and pave the way for future joint missions to explore Mars.
This post was last modified on March 10, 2023 at 5:49 pm
