NASA-ISRO NISAR satellite: All about the earth-observing mission crucial in fight against climate change

Engineers joined the two main components of NISAR – the spacecraft bus and the radar instrument payload – in an ISRO clean room in Bengaluru, in June. The payload arrived from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in March, while the bus was built at the ISRO facility. (Image courtesy: VDOS-URSC/www.NASA.gov)

NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, a pioneering Earth-observing satellite built and developed jointly by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is scheduled for an early 2024 launch. This innovative satellite aims to provide detailed insights into two types of ecosystems – forests and wetlands – vital to naturally regulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that are driving global climate change.

With a three-year mission duration, the satellite will globally monitor Earth's land and ice-covered surfaces, conducting scans of all land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days to gather crucial data. NISAR's radar, the first of its kind in space, will map Earth’s surface in extraordinary detail, measuring changes as minute as a centimeter, NASA said.

NISAR will serve as a critical tool for understanding ecosystem disturbances, ice-sheet collapse, natural hazards, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, sea level rise, and groundwater changes. It will also enable researchers to study deforestation and glacier melt to gain significant knowledge about climate change.

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Once it launches in 2024, NISAR will help researchers explore how changes in Earth’s forest and wetland ecosystems are affecting the global carbon cycle.

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Rigorous testing phase for mission readiness

At present, the NISAR satellite is undergoing performance evaluations and subsequent rounds of environmental tests to ensure its capability to withstand launch conditions and meet operational requirements. Following these tests, it will be transported to the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, positioned atop ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mark-II rocket, and deployed into low Earth orbit.