New Delhi: Just a few days after NASA finished application of the precautionary thermal coating on the NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar (NISAR) satellite, the first collaborative mission between NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and ISRO’s Space Applications Centre (SAC) is now being transported back into India. The C-130 Hercules took off from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, and will hop to the March Air Reserve Base in California to retrieve the radar antenna reflector, and then to the Hickman Air Force Base in Hawaii, the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, the Clark Air Base in Philippines before finally landing at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited Airport in Bengaluru, India.
The cargo bay where the satellite will be loaded. (Image Credit: NASA/Madison Griffin).
The team will be covering a distance of about 24,500 nautical miles over 80 hours of flight time during the mission. The NISAR satellite has innovative technology developed by JPL, with the Sweep Synthetic Aperture Radar (SweepSAR) technology, which provides high resolution satellite radar observations without compromising on the area of coverage. The satellite has the capacity to map the entire surface of the planet every 12 days, and will monitor the ice, vegetation and land surfaces of the entire world. The sensitive instruments on board can track the movement of glaciers, the health of forests, and ground water levels.
NISAR launch timeline
NASA and ISRO will only be able to launch the satellite in February next year. This is actually the second time that the NISAR satellite is being transported to India. The first time around, it went through a series of tests at the UR Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, and was supposed to launch last year. However, out of an abundance of caution, NASA opted to transport the satellite back to USA to apply a precautionary thermal coating, after carefully evaluating the ranges in temperatures that the satellite could have been exposed to.
