How would NISAR expand our understanding of the Earth?

On July 30, the India-US space collaboration crossed a historic milestone with the successful launch of NISAR, or the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite, a flagship earth observation mission jointly developed by the two nations’ space programmes. It is the first satellite to use radars of two frequencies — the L-band radar by NASA and the S-band radar by ISRO — to continuously monitor the earth’s surface. NISAR is expected to provide unprecedented data on land deformation, ice-sheet dynamics, forest biomass, and natural disasters like earthquakes and floods. With its high-resolution, all-weather, day-night imaging capabilities, NISAR aims to enhance climate resilience, agricultural monitoring, and disaster response. Beyond science, NISAR also holds commercial promise to enable new data services, geospatial analytics, and early-warning systems across sectors such as insurance, infrastructure, and agriculture. 

Guest: Dr. Karen  St. Germain, director of the Earth Science Division at the Science Mission Directorate at NASA 

Hosts: 

Mukunth V, Deputy Science Editor, The Hindu 

Kunal Shankar, Deputy Business Editor, The Hindu 

Video edited by Shivaraj S 

Audio edited by Sharmada Venkatasubramanian 

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