NISAR Mission on track for early 2024 launch, says JPL official

The NASA-ISRO NISAR mission, set to launch in early 2024, will provide reliable, high-resolution data on Earth's ecosystems and natural processes.

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, designed to observe natural processes and changes in earth’s complex ecosystems, is on track for an “early 2024” launch, a senior official at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said on Sunday.

The final tests on the joint NASA-ISRO earth-observing mission are scheduled for this week, Paul A. Rosen, Project Scientist for NISAR at JPL, told The Hindu. “As we speak, everything except the acoustic tests has been completed. The vibration test was completed yesterday [Saturday]. Final tests are planned this week. We are on track,” Dr. Rosen said.

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Dr. Rosen and several of his NASA-JPL colleagues associated with NISAR are scheduled to speak at the Global Science Festival Kerala (GSFK), under way at Thonnakkal here on Monday.

Designed as a low earth orbit (LEO) observatory, the NISAR mission is unique in several respects, not least the enormous amount of reliable, high resolution data expected from it over a three-year mission life. “The volume of data will be enormous, and it helps us to have a reliable set of measurements over any spot on the earth where we want to do science or monitoring applications, forest management, agriculture monitoring or even just looking at an approaching hurricane,” Dr. Rosen said.

The open science and open data policy makes the mission unique in its scope, he said. “The data will be placed on our respective data servers in India and the U.S. and they will be made open to the public essentially as soon as they are processed to a validated data product. For many SAR (synthetic aperture radar) missions, this is simply not the case,” he said.

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