Isro, NASA to collaborate on Mars exploration

Will also study the land surface changes on Earth jointly

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) has joined hands with the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) to launch a joint satellite mission to observe the Earth, as well as laying the ground work for future exploration missions to Mars.

Officials from the two space agencies met on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto on Tuesday to discuss and sign a charter that establishes a Nasa-Isro Mars Working Group for enhanced cooperation between the two countries in Mars exploration. They also signed an international agreement that defines how they would work together on the Nasa-Isro Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, planned to be launched in 2020.

“The signing of these two documents reflects the strong commitment Nasa and Isro have towards advancing science and improving life on Earth. This partnership will yield tangible benefits to both our countries and the world,” Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden was quoted as saying in the agency’s press release,

The group will seek to identify and implement scientific, programmatic and technological goals that Nasa and Isro have in common regarding Mars exploration. The group will meet once a year to plan cooperative activities, including potential Nasa-Isro cooperation on future missions to Mars.

The spacecraft sent by both the agencies have just arrived in the Mars orbit. Nasa’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft arrived on September 21. MAVEN is the first spacecraft dedicated to exploring the tenuous upper atmosphere of Mars. Isro’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), India’s first spacecraft to Mars, arrived on September 24 to study the Martian surface and atmosphere and demonstrate technologies needed for interplanetary missions.

One of the working group’s objectives will be to explore potential co-ordinated observations and science analysis between MAVEN and MOM, as well as other current and future Mars missions.

John Grunsfeld, Nasa associate administrator for science was quoted as saying that the new agreements between Nasa and Isro in Earth science and Mars exploration would significantly strengthen Isro-Nasa ties and the science that both would be able to produce as a result.

The NISAR mission, targeted to launch in 2020, would take global measurements of the causes and consequences of a variety of land surface changes on Earth.

The joint NISAR Earth-observing mission will make global measurements of the causes and consequences of land surface changes. Potential areas of research include ecosystem disturbances, ice sheet collapse and natural hazards. The NISAR mission is optimised to measure subtle changes to the Earth’s surface associated with motions of the crust and ice surfaces. NISAR would improve scientists’ understanding of key impacts of climate change and advance their knowledge of natural hazards.

NISAR would be the first satellite mission to use two different radar frequencies (L-band and S-band) to measure changes in the Earth’s surface less than a centimetre across. This allows the mission to observe a wide range of changes, from the flow rates of glaciers and ice sheets to the dynamics of earthquakes and volcanoes.

Under the terms of the new agreement, Nasa would provide the mission’s L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a high-rate communication sub-system for science data, GPS receivers, a solid state recorder, and a payload data subsystem. Isro would provide the spacecraft bus, an S-band SAR, and the launch vehicle and associated launch services.

Nasa had been studying concepts for a SAR mission in response to the National Academy of Science’s decadal survey of the agency’s Earth science programme in 2007. The agency developed a partnership with Isro that led to this joint mission. The partnership with India has been key to enabling many of the mission’s science objectives.

Nasa’s contribution to NISAR is being managed and implemented by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Nasa and Isro have been cooperating under the terms of a framework agreement signed in 2008. This cooperation includes a variety of activities in space sciences such as two Nasa payloads — the Mini-Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper — on Isro’s Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon in 2008. During the operational phase of this mission, the Mini-SAR instrument detected ice deposits near the moon’s northern pole.