BENGALURU: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Friday shared details of the images captured from the S-Band radar of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite.
“The first image of S-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) acquired on August 19 captures the fertile Godavari river delta in Andhra Pradesh. Mangroves, agriculture, arecanut plantations, acquaculture fields, etc are clearly seen in the image. The image highlights NISAR’s S-Band SAR ability to map river deltas and agricultural landscapes with precision,” the ISRO team said.
The NISAR satellite, a joint effort of NASA and ISRO, was launched on July 30 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre.
The ISRO team added that since the first acquisition on August 19, the S-Band SAR is regularly imaging over Indian landmass and Global Calibration-Validation sites in various payload operating configurations.
“Reference targets such as corner reflectors were deployed around Ahmedabad and a few more locations in India for calibration of the images. Data acquired over Amazon rainforests were also used for calibration of spacecraft pointing and images. Based on this, payload data acquisition parameters were fine-tuned resulting in high quality images. Initial analysis by scientists and engineers revealed the potential of S-Band SAR data for various targeted science and application areas like agriculture, forestry, geo-sciences, hydrology, Polar regions, Himalayan ice, snow and oceanic studies,” the ISRO team said.
The researchers added that on the the 100th day of NISAR in-orbit, ISRO will release the S-SAR images to the public.