NEW DELHI: A new US-Indian satellite is set to be launched in March next year, India’s science minister said in parliament, updating lawmakers on the first Earth-mapping joint mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization.
A collaboration agreement between ISRO and NASA was signed in 2014, with a targeted launch of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, project in 2024.
The satellite’s reflector, however, which is one of the main NASA contributions to the joint mission, had to undergo corrections, Science Minister Jitendra Singh told Parliament members on Wednesday.
“The Radar Antenna Reflector was delivered to ISRO by NASA in October 2024, which is reintegrated with the satellite and currently undergoing necessary tests,” Singh said in a written reply to a parliamentary query.
“Also, due to the eclipse season, the conditions are not conducive for deployment of NISAR’s boom and the Radar Antenna Reflector. In view of the aforementioned factors, NISAR is now likely to be launched during March 2025.”
The reflector is a key component of NISAR, and at 12m in diameter it will be the largest radar antenna of its kind ever launched into space.
It will focus transmitted and received microwave signals to and from the Earth’s surface, allowing the satellite to scan nearly all of the planet’s land and ice surfaces every week.
The data will provide a picture of how Earth’s surface moves horizontally and vertically.
“The information will be crucial to better understanding everything from the mechanics of Earth’s crust to which parts of the world are prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions,” the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which leads the US component of the project, said in last month’s mission update.
“The mission will be able to detect surface motions down to fractions of an inch. In addition to monitoring changes to Earth’s surface, the satellite will be able to track the motion of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice, and map changes to vegetation.”
The data is expected to help researchers better understand changes in the Earth’s surface and will also capture changes in its forest and wetland ecosystems.
Estimated to cost $1.5 billion, the NISAR mission is an equal collaboration between NASA and ISRO, with the US providing also the mission’s L-band radar, while the S-band radar is made in India.
The S-band radar is useful for monitoring crop structure and the roughness of land and ice surfaces, while the L-band instrument can penetrate denser forest canopies. Both sensors can see through clouds and collect data day and night.
The NISAR project marks the first time the Indian and US space agencies have cooperated on hardware development for Earth mapping.
Its launch will further add to India’s status as an emerging space superpower, following last year’s successful launch of Aditya-L1 — the country’s first solar observation mission, and the world’s second after the US Parker Solar Probe launched in 2021.
Also in 2023, ISRO’s Chandrayaan-3 moon rover made history by landing on the lunar surface, making India the first country to land near the lunar south pole and the fourth to land on the moon — after the US, the Soviet Union and China.
