Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) work in a clean room facility at ISRO's UR Rao Satellite Center (URSC) in Bangalore, India, in mid-June 2023. A crane is used for positioning. Placing the radar instrument payload for the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission on the satellite's spacecraft bus allows the two components to be combined.
Figure A shows the payload fully unloaded onto the bus.
NISAR, scheduled to launch in early 2024 from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India, is being jointly developed by NASA and ISRO to observe the movement of Earth's land and ice surfaces in great detail. . Because NISAR observes nearly every part of the Earth at least once every 12 days, the satellite helps scientists understand the dynamics of forests, wetlands, and farmland, among other things.
The radar instrument payload, partially wrapped in a gold thermal blanket, arrived in March from JPL and consists of an L-band and an S-band radar system, named as such to indicate the wavelength of the signal. I did. Both sensors can see through clouds and collect data day and night. The bus, shown in blue blanket, features components and systems developed by both ISRO and JPL and will be manufactured at URSC and provide power, navigation, pointing control and communications for the mission.
NISAR is an equal partnership between NASA and ISRO, and marks the first time that the two agencies are collaborating on hardware development for an Earth observation mission. JPL, which is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is leading the US component of the project and providing the mission's L-band SAR. NASA also provides a radar reflector antenna, a deployable boom, a high-speed communications subsystem for scientific data, a GPS receiver, a solid-state recorder, and a payload data subsystem. Leading the ISRO component of the mission, URSC provides the spacecraft bus, S-band SAR electronics, launch vehicle, and associated launch services and operations for the satellite mission.
For more information about NISAR, visit https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/.
