On July 30, 2025, NASA and India’s ISRO successfully launched NASA–ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) aboard the GSLV-F16 rocket from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre, marking the most ambitious Earth-observing collaboration between the two agencies to date.
NISAR is the world’s first dual-frequency radar satellite, equipped with NASA’s L-band and ISRO’s S-band synthetic aperture radars. This allows it to peer through clouds, vegetation, and ice—and detect ground movement as small as 1 cm, day or night.
It will orbit in a sun-synchronous polar orbit at roughly 745–747 km altitude, mapping nearly all land and ice-covered regions every 12 days. Over its planned three-year mission, NISAR is expected to deliver crucial intelligence on climate change, water resources, permafrost thaw, volcanic activity, landslides, subsidence, glacier melt, and human-induced shifts like urban growth and agriculture changes.
Data collected—including interferograms, deformation maps, and displacement imagery—will be publicly available within 1–2 days, with emergency access expedited when needed.
The importance of this satellite can be understood in the context of the earthquake of magnitude 8.8 off Russia’s Far East coast this week and the subsequent tsunami it caused.
This mission underscores a major decade-long investment (~$1.5 billion) and symbolizes deepened scientific diplomacy between the United States and India, commemorating 50 years since their earlier joint Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in 1975. NISAR opens a new chapter in Earth observation—with dual-band radar capability, global coverage every 12 days, and centimeter-level sensitivity, it promises profound benefits for disaster monitoring, environmental science, and global climate resilience.