NASA, ISRO join hands to build Earth-imaging satellite, NISAR

New Delhi: US space agency NASA is considered a pioneer in space programmes and its Indian counterpart, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has also firmly planted its feet as a name to be reckoned with after its groundbreaking achievements.

For a long time, space aficionados and even some important figures in the field of space have been plugging the two space agencies together to come up with a collaboration and looks like it's finally going to happen!

According to latest reports, NASA and ISRO have joined hands to make a satellite called NISAR that will help scientists monitor the Earth like never before.

NISAR – the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite – is estimated to cost the two countries over 1.5 billion dollars and could possibly be the world's most expensive Earth imaging satellite.

Undoubtedly, Indian and American scientists are working round the clock to make the satellite a reality.

"NISAR is the first big collaboration between NASA and ISRO, certainly on RADAR but just in general as well. This is two frequency RADAR, it is an L-band 24 centimetre RADAR and S-band 13 centimetre. S-band is being built by ISRO and L-band by NASA. It is a major collaboration both in terms of the technical building of the satellite as well as working together across the Pacific between India and US," said Paul A Rosen, a scientist working on the NISAR satellite project, NDTV reported.

The NISAR satellite is scheduled for a 2021 launch from India using the Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and will definitely open a new vista in Indo-US friendship.

Rosen also said, "We are going to be making snap shots of the Earth every week using these two radars that gives us a time lapse image of the motion of the tectonic plates, of the ice sheets, of the changes in vegetation over land in agriculture and forests. So 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. It is very relevant to what society cares about which is changes in our climate, changes in our environment and how it affects society," NDTV further reported.