SRIHARIKOTA, INDIA – The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) satellite took off successfully at 5:40 PM IST on Wednesday, July 30, 2025. This was a big step forward for international space cooperation and Earth science. The NISAR satellite took off from the second launch pad at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota aboard ISRO’s Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) -F16 rocket. It will spend five years changing the way we think about Earth’s changing processes and natural risks.
This mission is the first time a GSLV rocket has sent a satellite into a Sun Synchronous Polar Orbit. It shows how ISRO’s skills are getting better. More importantly, NISAR is the first major Earth observation satellite built by both the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Both agencies provided important hardware and knowledge.
Sue Owen, deputy chief scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said, “This is the first time that NASA and ISRO have worked so closely together on a mission, with both organizations providing major hardware contributions.” This shows how deep this collaboration is. During the launch, a specialized NASA crew worked with ISRO staff at the launch site. Another 20-member team from the U.S. space agency worked at the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network, which is the mission operations center in Bengaluru.
A Technological Wonder for Earth Science
The NISAR satellite weighs 2,392 kilograms and is a technological marvel. It has both S-band (3.2 GHz) radars made by ISRO and L-band (1.25 GHz) radars made by NASA. This is the first satellite in the world to use dual-frequency radar imaging to look at Earth. NISAR will use the new SweepSAR technology to scan the whole planet every 12 days with centimeter-level accuracy. It will be in orbit 743 kilometers (461 miles) above Earth.
The NISAR satellite, which has been in the works for more than ten years and cost $1.5 billion, has a lot of potential to help science and disaster preparedness. It will be very helpful for figuring out natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, and landslides because of its advanced features. It will also give us never-before-seen data for mapping the important ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, which will help us learn more about climate change.
In addition to these important uses, the satellite’s huge amount of data will be useful for:
Classifying sea ice.
Finding ships.
Monitoring the shoreline.
Tracking storms.
Mapping crops.
Keeping an eye on how wet the soil is.
Governments, researchers, and disaster management organizations all over the world need all of this data to make better judgments and take action before problems happen.
A Ten-Year Journey of Working Together
The National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. did an Earth Science Decadal Survey in 2007 that led to the idea for NISAR. This assessment found that there is a big need for more data and information in three important areas of Earth science: ecosystems, the deformation of the Earth’s crust, and cryospheric sciences.
NASA first went to Germany, Canada, and Argentina to ask for better radar, but they were not successful. In 2011, Paul Rosen, the project scientist for the NISAR mission, went to ISRO to talk about the mission idea.
Rosen stated during a press briefing before the launch last week, “India said this is exactly the kind of thing we would like to do.” He talked about how the concept for a dual-radar system came about: “Someone, maybe me, said we could put two radars on one (reflector). They (ISRO) could make one and we could make the other, and they really liked that idea. That’s how Nisar was made. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the U.S. in 2014 and a meeting with then-President Barack Obama, the agreement between governments to assist NISAR was officially signed.
Even during the difficult times of the Covid-19 outbreak, the collaboration went on without a hitch. Phil Burella, the NISAR project manager, talked on the dedication: “During the height of Covid, we had 65 engineers come from Isro to JPL to keep the integration and tests going.” In the last two and a half years, NASA has deployed more than 175 engineers to ISRO to help with integration and testing and to make us ready for where we are now and for the launch.
Access to data and its effect on the future
After the NISAR satellite’s 90-day commissioning period is over, data will start to flow. During this time, all of its systems will be thoroughly tested and calibrated. This important information will be available to scholars and the public for free within a day or two of being observed, and in almost real-time in emergencies, which will make it much more useful. The Alaska Satellite Facility (ASF) will have data from NASA’s L-band instrument, and the National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad will have data from ISRO’s S-band equipment on Bhoonidhi.
NISAR is proof of what scientists from around the world can do together. It promises to open up new areas of Earth science and help people better understand and respond to the constantly changing environment of our planet.