Indo-US Space Ties
- India and the Unites States of America share a history of space cooperation, going back to 1963 when India launched its first U.S-manufactured sounding rocket.
- In the 1970’s ISRO and NASA conducted the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE), which helped beam television programs to more than 2400 villages across India.
- Further, in 2008, Chandrayaan I – India’s first mission to the moon carried scientific instruments built by international partners, including two by NASA.
Also Read: इसरो जून में भारत का सबसे शक्तिशाली रॉकेट लॉन्च करने वाला है
NISAR
- NISAR or the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar is the latest collaborative project between the two agencies, an ambitious earth monitoring satellite scheduled to be launched in 2021.
- NASA and ISRO have signed two documents to launch the NASA-ISRO satellite mission.
- The purpose of the mission is to observe Earth and establish a pathway for future joint missions for Mars exploration, according to the NASA website.
- NISAR is the first big collaboration between NASA and ISRO, as reported by NDTV.
- According to the team, NISAR is a two frequency RADAR, it is an L-band 24 centimeter RADAR and S-band 13 centimeter. S-band is being built by ISRO while NASA is taking the responsibility for the L-band by NASA.
- The satellite will take weekly snapshots of earth, using the two radars, that will provide time-lapse images of the motion of tectonic plates, ice sheets and changes in vegetation over land in agriculture and forests.
- According to a scientist working on the project, “What we are doing is looking at time variability of the Earth over the life of the mission to understand how disasters evolve, how earthquakes occur, how volcanoes occur, how the ice sheets are changing and affecting sea level rise, and how forest fires and changes in the forest cover affect the atmosphere.”
- Likely to cost the two countries over 1.5 billion dollars, this satellite is also likely to be the world’s most expensive earth imaging satellite.
Read in Hindi: NISAR उपग्रह बनाने के लिए इसरो और नासा का सहयोग
- The NISAR satellite, scheduled to be launched from India, four years from now, using the Geo-Synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) also promises to further strengthen Indo-US ties.
- NASA had appreciated ISRO’s first indigenous radar imaging satellite, (Risat-1), which enables imaging of the earth’s surface during day and night under all weather conditions.
Source: The Better India
