NISAR India-US Earth Science Satellite Rocket Liftoff | ISRO/NASA/JPL

NISAR India-US Earth Science Satellite Rocket Liftoff | ISRO/NASA/JPL

Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) F16 Rocket—NISAR liftoff

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Mission Control Center in Pasadena, California, during NISAR launch

Eating “lucky peanuts” before launches and other major mission events is a longstanding tradition at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

India-US Space Cooperation: NISAR—Earth Science Satellite

🚀The NISAR Earth science satellite lifted off aboard an Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) F16 rocket at 8:10 a.m. EDT (5:10 p.m. IST), Wednesday, July 30, 2025 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, India. The ISRO ground controllers began communicating with NISAR about 20 minutes after launch, at just after 8:29 a.m. EDT and confirmed it is operating as expected.

🌍This new Earth science satellite will soon provide insights into natural hazards, ecosystems, agriculture, and other fields of study that affect communities around the globe. The NISAR mission is a collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It will use radar to track Earth’s changing surface in fine detail.

Short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), NISAR features an advanced radar system with two instrumentsone from ISRO and one built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Using radar enables NISAR to map Earth’s land and ice surfaces day or night, regardless of whether skies are cloudy or clear. 

🛰️ NISAR will scan the entire globe every 12 days, providing high-resolution, all-weather, day-and-night data. It can detect even subtle changes in Earth’s surface—like ground deformation, ice sheet shifts, and vegetation dynamics.

The mission will support many critical applications including sea ice monitoring, ship detection, storm tracking, soil moisture changes, surface water mapping, and disaster response.

🤝 This represents a milestone in over a decade of collaboration between ISRO & NASA/JPL.

Follow https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/nisar for the latest updates.

For more information on the NISAR mission, visit: 
https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/

https://nasa.gov/nisa

NISAR is the first-ever collaboration between NASA and ISRO on an Earth-observing mission. JPL, managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, leads the U.S. component of the project and is providing the mission’s L-band SAR. NASA is also providing the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem. ISRO is providing the spacecraft bus, the S-band SAR, the launch vehicle, and associated launch services and satellite mission operations.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ISRO
Image Date: July 30, 2025

#NASA #ISRO #Space #Planet #Earth #Science #NISAR #Satellite #EarthSatellite #EarthScience #Spacecraft #SyntheticApertureRadar #SAR #EarthObservation #Land #Ice #Climate #ClimateChange #GlobalHeating #SpaceTechnology #Engineering #SDSC #Sriharikota #GSLVF16Rocket #India #BhāratGaṇarājya #JPL #Caltech #UnitedStates #STEM #Education