BENGALURU: A US Air Force C-17 aircraft landed in Bengaluru bringing with it the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)-National Aeronautical & Space Administration (NASA) jointly developed NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite with it for final integration here.
The satellite is expected to be launched in 2024 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh in a near-polar orbit. NASA requires a minimum of three years of global science operations with the L-band radar, while ISRO is looking at five years of operations with the S-band radar over specified target areas in India and the Indian Ocean.
The NISAR 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. It will observe Earth’s land and ice-covered surfaces globally with 12-day regularity on ascending and descending passes, sampling the planet every six days on average for a baseline 3-year mission. NISAR will also be used by ISRO for agricultural mapping and monitoring landslide-prone areas.