"Respect For India's Space Programme Is Off The Charts After Chandrayaan-3": NASA Official

The India-US joint mission to study climate change with the world's most expensive Earth imaging satellite is in its final stages and the launch is expected in the first quarter of 2024, a senior NASA official has said. 

Speaking exclusively to NDTV on Tuesday, Laurie Leshin, the Director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) will also help in predicting hazards like earthquakes and tsunamis, and that respect for India's space programme is "off the charts" after Chandrayaan-3. 

Purpose, Impact

NISAR is a low earth orbit observatory being developed by ISRO and NASA, which will map the entire Earth in 12 days and provide consistent data for understanding changes in the planet's ecosystems, ice mass, vegetation, sea level rise, groundwater levels and natural hazards, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and landslides.

On how the satellite will make a difference in the life of the common man, Ms Leshin said, "Understanding how the Earth's surface is changing is really important for understanding the impacts of climate change... NISAR will allow us to observe with precision small changes in that surface. Everyone should care about melting ice sheets and changing forests, and earthquakes and volcanoes, so it really will impact people's lives everywhere."

The NASA official said watching things changing on the Earth's surface will help scientists understand the physics behind the change and better predict what is coming in the future. 

Collaboration

"We are so thrilled with the collaboration between NASA and ISRO on NISAR. This is the biggest collaboration on something technological between our two nations and certainly the biggest collaboration in the history of space exploration between the US and India. I am sure this is the beginning of many more things to come," Ms Leshin said. 

"It is one thing to talk about it at a very high level and leadership talking about collaboration, but we have had 30 or 40 engineers at a time here in Bengaluru working shoulder-to-shoulder with their ISRO colleagues for over nine months," she added. 

Scientists from ISRO also spent time working on the radar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and it  was then brought to Bengaluru to be mated with the spacecraft. "Overall, the teams have worked together spectacularly well," Ms Leshin asserted.

"Many Ways To Success"

Asked about NASA's key learnings from the collaboration, Ms Leshin said, "We are learning that there are many ways to be successful in space. We are learning from each other. If you talk to our colleagues at ISRO, they would say they have learnt from us and my colleagues say we have absolutely learnt from India in how they do their work. And that is good for everyone. Innovation loves new ideas coming together."

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's director said that respect for India's space programme, which was already high, has gone up after the historic success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission.

"We are so impressed with Chandrayaan-3 and the future plans for Indian space exploration, and we look forward to having many more partnerships between NASA and ISRO. The respect for India's space programme - it was already very high because India has accomplished so much in space - but now it's off the charts."  

Launch Next Year

The director said the launch of NISAR is expected in the first quarter of 2024 and both space agencies have decided to go ahead with it only when they are ready. The spacecraft will undergo a series of tests after the solar panels are attached to ensure that it will survive and do its job in the space environment.