India-US Joint Space Mission to Launch This Year

India and the United States will be venturing into space together for the first time later this year. Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh said that a joint Earth observation project called NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite will be launched this year. As of now, there is no fixed date for the launch.

During the visit of a US delegation led by the director of the National Science Foundation, Sethuraman Panchanathan, the Science and Technology Minister shared that the NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) Mission will be launched in 2023. The satellite will be designed to measure the Earth’s changing ecosystems to provide information about biomass, groundwater, natural hazards, and sea level rise. It will also support a host of other applications.

The three-year mission will have the satellite record data of the Earth’s land- and ice-covered surfaces globally at an average of every six days. It will do ascending and descending passes with a 12-day regularity and make its observations.

Jitendra Singh also suggested increasing cooperation between the two countries in the space sector to better manage space debris and other emerging areas. Besides space, Singh also proposed deeper corporation in fields such as advanced wireless, artificial intelligence (AI), astrophysics, biotechnology, cyber security, clean energy, defense, geosciences, and semiconductors.

The leader of the US delegation, Panchanathan, said that the US is looking forward to working on areas like critical minerals, smart agriculture, bio-economy, and 6G technologies. Further discussions on potential projects will be carried out in March.

Vineet Washington