Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) has completed the development of a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) which is capable of producing extremely high-resolution images for a joint earth observation satellite mission with the U.S. space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Key Points
- NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) is an association for a dual-frequency L and S-band SAR for earth observation.
- As per NASA, NISAR will be the 1st satellite mission to use two different radar frequencies (L-band and S-band) to measure changes in our planet’s surface less than a centimeter across.
- NASA and Bengaluru-headquartered ISRO signed a partnership on September 30, 2014, to launch NISAR.
- The mission is targeted to launch in early 2022 from ISRO’s Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh’s Nellore district, about 100km north of Chennai.
- NASA is providing the mission’s L-band SAR, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem.
- ISRO is providing the spacecraft bus, the S-band radar, the launch vehicle, and associated launch services for the mission, whose goal is to make global measurements of the causes and consequences of land surface changes using advanced radar imaging.
- The S-band SAR payload of the NISAR satellite mission was flagged off by the Secretary in the Department of Space and ISRO Chairman K Sivan on March 4 through virtual mode.
- The payload has been shipped from ISRO’s Ahmedabad-based Space Applications Centre (SAC) to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena in the U.S. for integration with the latter’s L-band SAR payload, an ISRO statement said.
- NISAR would provide a means of disentangling highly spatial and temporally complex processes ranging from ecosystem disturbances to ice sheet collapses and natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and landslides.
- NASA added that the mission will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses, providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea-level rise, and groundwater, and will support a host of other applications.
NISAR will observe Earth’s land and an ice-covered surface globally with 12-day regularity on ascending and descending passes, sampling Earth on average every six days for a baseline three-year mission, NASA said on the mission’s website.
NISAR uses a sophisticated information-processing technique known as SAR to produce extremely high-resolution images. Radar penetrates clouds and darkness, enabling NISAR to collect data day and night in any weather.
The instrument’s imaging swath the width of the strip of data collected along the length of the orbit track is greater than 240km, which allows it to image the entire Earth in 12 days.