Collaboration for future: Isro and India will benefit from Nasa

The successful launch of the Nisar (Nasa-Isro Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre marks the second big mission where the two space agencies have joined hands, coming soon after gaganaut Shubhanshu Shukla travelled to the International Space Station on the Axiom 4 mission. This may be the precursor to more cooperation between the agencies, given that India in 2023 signed up for the Artemis Accords. The Artemis Accords provide a common set of principles for civil exploration and use of outer space. While both agencies benefit from cooperation, the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) may benefit more. The Indian agency has an ambitious programme including multiple manned missions over the next 15 years. This will require Isro to get a grip on a host of new technologies, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) could help with the use of its facilities as well as technical advice. 

In theory, the Artemis signup allows Isro and the fast-growing Indian aerospace sector to bid for Nasa tenders and the famously frugal Indian engineering sector could find opportunities there and pick up new skills. However, the Donald Trump regime, in the United States (US), seems committed to cutting Nasa’s budgetary support and the curtailment of US space programmes will reduce opportunities. The Nisar mission used Isro facilities and its launch vehicle to put the 2,400 kg satellite into orbit. The satellite carries two radars, which will produce a dynamic, three-dimensional view of Earth in great detail. Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) provided the L-band radar, and Isro’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad developed the S-band radar with the integration done by JPL. This is the first time the two agencies have codeveloped hardware. Being put into a sun-synchronous polar orbit, which circles Earth every 97 minutes, Nisar will pass over the same areas at an interval of 12 days, observing and mapping changes to the surface from 747 kilometres above. 

The radars are sensitive to different things. The L-band will measure soil moisture, forest biomass, and motions of land and ice surfaces, while the S-band radar will monitor agricultural land, grassland ecosystems, erosion, and infrastructure movements. Apart from fostering a general understanding of various natural and human-made processes, Nisar could help with fast disaster responses and with natural-resource management policy. This “timelapse” view will track changes in Earth’s forests and wetland ecosystems, monitor the deformation and motion of frozen surfaces, and detect movements of Earth’s crust down to millimetres. It should therefore pick up precursors to earthquakes, landslides, and volcanic actions, along with land subsidence and melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and forest fires. Crucially it will also spot human-induced changes caused by farming, and by infrastructure projects. 

This should therefore lead to a deeper understanding of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and landslides since researchers will see how things change across time and seasons. Nisar will take 90 days to fully deploy and complete tests and start collecting data. The $1.5 billion joint mission took over a decade to put together. The data will be freely accessible and it could transform the understanding of climate change, natural disasters, agricultural cycles, and the management of water resources. Unfortunately, given the thrust of US-government policy, Nasa and other American agencies may not be able to fully capitalise on the data but India will be a beneficiary for sure.