Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
An equal collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation, NISAR will offer unprecedented insights into Earth’s constantly changing land and ice surfaces using synthetic aperture radar technology. The spacecraft, depicted here in an artist’s concept, will launch from India.NASA/JPL-Caltech A Q&A with the lead U.S. scientist of the mission, which will track changes in everything from wetlands to ice sheets to infrastructure damaged by natural disasters.
The upcoming U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission will observe Earth like no mission before, offering insights about our planet’s ever-changing surface.
The NISAR mission is a first-of-a-kind dual-band radar satellite that will measure land deformation from earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes, producing data for science and disaster response. It will track how much glaciers and ice sheets are advancing or retreating and it will monitor growth and loss of forests and wetlands for insights on the global carbon cycle.
As diverse as NISAR’s impact will be, the mission’s winding path to launch — in a few months’ time — has also been remarkable. Paul Rosen, NISAR’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, has been there at every step. He recently discussed the mission and what sets it apart.
NISAR Project Scientist Paul Rosen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory first traveled to India in late 2011 to discuss collaboration with ISRO scientists on an Earth-observing radar mission. NASA and ISRO signed an agreement in 2014 to develop NISAR. NASA/JPL-Caltech How will NISAR improve our understanding of Earth?
The planet’s surfaces never stop changing — in some ways small and subtle, and in other ways monumental and sudden. With NISAR, we’ll measure that change roughly every week, with each pixel capturing an area about half the size of a tennis court. Taking imagery of nearly all Earth’s land and ice surfaces this frequently and at such a small scale — down to the centimeter — will help us put the pieces together into one coherent picture to create a story about the planet as a living system.
What sets NISAR apart from other Earth missions?
NISAR will be the first Earth-observing satellite with two kinds of radar — an L-band system with a 10-inch (25-centimeter) wavelength and an S-band system with a 4-inch (10-centimeter) wavelength.
Whether microwaves reflect or penetrate an object depends on their wavelength. Shorter wavelengths are more sensitive to smaller objects such as leaves and rough surfaces, whereas longer wavelengths are more reactive with larger structures like boulders and tree trunks.
So NISAR’s two radar signals will react differently to some features on Earth’s surface. By taking advantage of what each signal is or isn’t sensitive to, researchers can study a broader range of features than they could with either radar on its own, observing the same features with different wavelengths.
Is this new technology?
The concept of a spaceborne synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, studying Earth’s processes dates to the 1970s, when NASA launched Seasat. Though the mission lasted only a few months, it produced first-of-a-kind images that changed the remote-sensing landscape for decades to come.
It also drew me to JPL in 1981 as a college student: I spent two summers analyzing data from the mission. Seasat led to NASA’s Shuttle Imaging Radar program and later to the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.
What will happen to the data from the mission?
Our data products will fit the needs of users across the mission’s science focus areas — ecosystems, cryosphere, and solid Earth — plus have many uses beyond basic research like soil-moisture and water resources monitoring.
We’ll make the data easily accessible. Given the volume of the data, NASA decided that it would be processed and stored in the cloud, where it’ll be free to access.
How did the ISRO partnership come about?
We proposed DESDynI (Deformation, Ecosystem Structure, and Dynamics of Ice), an L-band satellite, following the 2007 Decadal Survey by the National Academy of Sciences. At the time, ISRO was exploring launching an S-band satellite. The two science teams proposed a dual-band mission, and in 2014 NASA and ISRO agreed to partner on NISAR.
Since then, the agencies have been collaborating across more than 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) and 13 time zones. Hardware was built on different continents before being assembled in India to complete the satellite. It’s been a long journey — literally.
More About NISAR
The NISAR mission is an equal collaboration between NASA and ISRO and marks the first time the two agencies have cooperated on hardware development for an Earth-observing mission. Managed for the agency by Caltech, JPL 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.
Space Applications Centre Ahmedabad, ISRO’s lead center for payload development, is providing the mission’s S-band SAR instrument and is responsible for its calibration, data processing, and development of science algorithms to address the scientific goals of the mission. U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, which leads the ISRO components of the mission, is providing the spacecraft bus. The launch vehicle is from ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, launch services are through ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre, and satellite mission operations are by ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network. National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad is primarily responsible for S-band data reception, operational products generation, and dissemination.
To learn more about NISAR, visit:
https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-001
Share
Details
Last Updated Jan 06, 2025 Related Terms
NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Climate Change Earth Earth Science Earth Science Division Ice & Glaciers Jet Propulsion Laboratory Seasat Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) SIR-C/X-SAR (Shuttle Imaging Radar-C / X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar) Explore More
27 min read Summary of the Third Annual AEOIP Workshop
Introduction The Applied Earth Observations Innovation Partnership (AEOIP) was established in 2018 to facilitate knowledge…
Article 3 days ago 5 min read NASA’s LEXI Will Provide X-Ray Vision of Earth’s Magnetosphere
A NASA X-ray imager is heading to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign,…
Article 3 days ago 2 min read Science Done by Volunteers Highlighted at December’s American Geophysical Union Meeting
More than 30,000 scientists gathered in Washington, D.C. during the second week of December –…
Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
5 min read
NASA’s LEXI Will Provide X-Ray Vision of Earth’s Magnetosphere
A NASA X-ray imager is heading to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign, where it will capture the first global images of the magnetic field that shields Earth from solar radiation.
The Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager, or LEXI, instrument is one of 10 payloads aboard the next lunar delivery through NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, set to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than mid-January, with Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Lander. The instrument will support NASA’s goal to understand how our home planet responds to space weather, the conditions in space driven by the Sun.
NASA’s next mission to the Moon will carry an instrument called LEXI (the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager), which will provide the first-ever global view of the magnetic environment that shields Earth from solar radiation. This video can be freely shared and downloaded at https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14739.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Once the dust clears from its lunar landing, LEXI will power on, warm up, and direct its focus back toward Earth. For six days, it will collect images of the X-rays emanating from the edges of our planet’s vast magnetosphere. This comprehensive view could illustrate how this protective boundary responds to space weather and other cosmic forces, as well as how it can open to allow streams of charged solar particles in, creating aurora and potentially damaging infrastructure.
“We’re trying to get this big picture of Earth’s space environment,” said Brian Walsh, a space physicist at Boston University and LEXI’s principal investigator. “A lot of physics can be esoteric or difficult to follow without years of specific training, but this will be science that you can see.”
What LEXI will see is the low-energy X-rays that form when a stream of particles from the Sun, called the solar wind, slams into Earth’s magnetic field. This happens at the edge of the magnetosphere, called the magnetopause. Researchers have recently been able to detect these X-rays in a patchwork of observations from other satellites and instruments. From the vantage point of the Moon, however, the whole magnetopause will be in LEXI’s field of view.
In this visualization, the LEXI instrument is shown onboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which will deliver 10 Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) payloads to the Moon. Firefly Aerospace The team back on Earth will be working around the clock to track how the magnetosphere expands, contracts, and changes shape in response to the strength of the solar wind.
“We expect to see the magnetosphere breathing out and breathing in, for the first time,” said Hyunju Connor, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the NASA lead for LEXI. “When the solar wind is very strong, the magnetosphere will shrink and push backward toward Earth, and then expand when the solar wind weakens.”
The LEXI instrument will also be poised to capture magnetic reconnection, which is when the magnetosphere’s field lines merge with those in the solar wind and release energetic particles that rain down on Earth’s poles. This could help researchers answer lingering questions about these events, including whether they happen at multiple sites simultaneously, whether they occur steadily or in bursts, and more.
These solar particles streaming into Earth’s atmosphere can cause brilliant auroras, but they can also damage satellites orbiting the planet or interfere with power grids on the ground.
“We want to understand how nature behaves,” Connor said, “and by understanding this we can help protect our infrastructure in space.”
The LEXI team packs the instrument at Boston University. Michael Spencer/Boston University The CLPS delivery won’t be LEXI’s first trip to space. A team at Goddard, including Walsh, built the instrument (then called STORM) to test technology to detect low-energy X-rays over a wide field of view. In 2012, STORM launched into space on a sounding rocket, collected X-ray images, and then fell back to Earth.
It ended up in a display case at Goddard, where it sat for a decade. When NASA put out a call for CLPS projects that could be done quickly and with a limited budget, Walsh thought of the instrument and the potential for what it could see from the lunar surface.
“We’d break the glass — not literally — but remove it, restore it, and refurbish it, and that would allow us to look back and get this global picture that we’ve never had before,” he said. Some old optics and other components were replaced, but the instrument was overall in good shape and is now ready to fly again. “There’s a lot of really rich science we can get from this.”
Under the CLPS model, NASA is investing in commercial delivery services to the Moon to enable industry growth and support long-term lunar exploration. As a primary customer for CLPS deliveries, NASA aims to be one of many customers on future flights. NASA Goddard is a lead science collaborator on LEXI. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the development of seven of the 10 CLPS payloads carried on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, including LEXI.
Learn more about CLPS and Artemis at:
https://www.nasa.gov/clps
By Kate Ramsayer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Share
Details
Last Updated Jan 03, 2025 Editor Abbey Interrante Related Terms
Artemis Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Earth’s Magnetic Field Earth’s Moon Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division Magnetosphere Science & Research The Sun Explore More
2 min read NASA Workshops Culturally Inclusive Planetary Engagement with Educators
Article
20 hours ago
3 min read Astronomy Activation Ambassadors: A New Era
Article
3 days ago
5 min read NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Makes History With Closest Pass to Sun
Article
7 days ago
Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
-
By NASA
Peering through the window of the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft, NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick captured this image on Oct. 7, 2024 of the SpaceX Dragon Freedom spacecraft as vivid green and pink aurora swirled through Earth’s atmosphere while the International Space Station soared 273 miles above the Indian Ocean.
Visit Dominick’s photography on station to experience the wonders of space through his eyes, enriched by his remarkable journey of orbiting the Earth 3,760 times.
To see a short-term forecast of the location and intensity of the next aurora check this link: Aurora – 30 Minute Forecast and also NASA’s Guide to Finding and Photographing Auroras.
Image Credit: NASA/Matthew Dominick
View the full article
-
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.