The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have worked together to construct the NISAR satellite, which will expand our understanding of earth’s dynamics and offer precise insights into environmental phenomena.
The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), which stands for NASA-ISRO Joint Synthetic Aperture Radar, is being collaboratively constructed by the two organisations and is scheduled to launch in early 2024. It will track movements of Earth’s land and ice surfaces in incredibly fine detail.
In Bengaluru, India, two significant parts of the NISAR satellite were united to form a single spacecraft. Understanding of climate change, deforestation, glacier melt, volcanoes, earthquakes, and other concerns will be improved by the NISAR satellite. According to NASA, NISAR will aid scientists in understanding, among other observables, the dynamics of forests, wetlands, and agricultural fields as it monitors practically every area of our world at least once every 12 days.
In an ISRO clean room in Bengaluru, India, in June, a crane was used to align NISAR’s radar instrument payload with the satellite’s spacecraft bus. The instrument payload is partially covered in gold thermal blanketing. The satellite’s spherical radar sensor payload is about the size of an SUV, has two radar systems, and is partially covered in thermal blanketing that is gold in colour.
The S-band radar is particularly effective for monitoring crop structure, the roughness of land and ice surfaces, while the L-band equipment can pierce deeper forest canopies to observe, among other things, the woody trunks of trees.
The S-band and L-band transmissions have wavelengths of roughly 4 inches (10 centimetres) and 10 inches (25 centimetres), respectively, and both sensors have the capability of collecting data day and night and through clouds.
“The payload travelled via a diversion to arrive at this location. The S-band radar was created at the Space Applications Centre in western India, and it was flown to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California in March 2021, where scientists had been working on the L-band radar that NISAR had been using. The two systems were attached to the payload’s barrel-shaped structure at JPL before being flown to the U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC) in Bengaluru, southern India, in March 2023, according to the press statement.
The spacecraft’s primary body, or bus, was being developed by URSC engineers and technicians working with JPL teams. The bus is protected during assembly and testing before launch by a blue blanket. Power, navigation, pointing control, and communications for the mission will be provided by the bus, which contains systems and components created by both ISRO and JPL.
Teams from NASA and ISRO have been collaborating to route thousands of feet of cable between the radar payload and bus since their joining in a URSC clean room in June of this year. Solar panels and the wire-mesh reflector, which will extend at the end of a 30-foot (9-meter) boom, still need to be affixed to the satellite. According to a NASA press statement, the reflector will be the biggest radar antenna of its sort ever flown into space, measuring almost 40 feet (12 metres) in diameter.
