- NASA and ISRO will launch the NISAR satellite from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre in July.
- The $1.5 billion satellite will monitor Earth's surface with advanced dual-frequency radar technology.
- NISAR can capture data day or night, unaffected by weather, unlike traditional optical satellites.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) are set to launch satellite NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre this July. The $1.5 billion Earth-observing satellite, weighing nearly three tonnes, will monitor the planet's surface with unmatched precision, using advanced radar to scan land, ice, and water every 12 days.
Jointly developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ISRO's Space Applications Centre, NISAR is the world's first Earth-observing satellite equipped with dual-frequency radar, L-band and S-band. Using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology, it will actively beam radar signals to Earth and analyse the reflections to create high-resolution images. Unlike optical satellites that depend on sunlight and clear skies, NISAR can capture data day or night, and even "see" through cloud cover, smoke, or dense vegetation.
What sets NISAR apart is its commitment to open data. The high-resolution imagery and insights it collects will be made freely available to scientists, agencies, and governments across the globe.
This technology makes it a powerful tool for tracking natural disasters, changes in groundwater, agricultural patterns, forest biomass, and the shifting of tectonic plates. It can even detect ground shifts as small as a few millimetres, making it vital for monitoring earthquakes, landslides, glacier melt, dam subsidence, coastal erosion, and forest biomass.
It can also track soil moisture, helping farmers improve irrigation and boost crop yields. With wide-ranging uses, NISAR will aid disaster response, climate research, and sustainable farming worldwide.
The NISAR mission has been under development for over a decade, with joint engineering efforts led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and ISRO's Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad.
NISAR is now being prepped for its July launch aboard an ISRO GSLV Mark II rocket. Before this, it went through months of integration and rigorous testing at ISRO's Bengaluru facility, where engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and ISRO worked closely since March 2023.
