(BBC News) Indian and US space agencies have launched a new satellite that will keep a hawk’s eye on Earth, detecting and reporting even the smallest changes in land, sea, and ice sheets.
Data from the joint mission by Indian Space agency ISRO and NASA will help not just the two countries but the world in preparing and dealing with disasters.
The 2,392-kg NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) was launched at 17:40 India time (12:10 GMT) on Wednesday from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in south India.
The satellite comes close on the heels of the Axiom-4 mission which saw an Indian astronaut going to the International Space Station for the first time.
NASA, which already has more than two dozen observation satellites in space, says NISAR is the “most sophisticated radar we’ve ever built,” and that it will be able to spot the “minutest of changes anywhere in the world.”
The “first-of-its-kind satellite” will watch Earth using two radar frequencies – NASA’s L-band and ISRO’s S-band.
The satellite will be shot into the “sun-synchronous polar orbit”, which means it will pass over the same areas of Earth at a regular interval, observing and mapping changes to our planet’s surface, former NASA scientist Mila Mitra told the BBC.
NASA and ISRO say NISAR will revisit the same spot every 12 days. It will detect changes in land, ice, or coastal shifts as small as centimetres, says Mitra.