ISRO

NASA

NISAR

satellite

Tapan Misra

Gujarat

Scientists working on one of the biggest collaborative projects undertaken byandwill take the project a step ahead today by kicking off the radar flight testing of(NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar). A special aircraft landed at the city airport on Tuesday to carry the radars developed at the Space Application Centre’s (SAC) Ahmedabad facility for initial testing.NISAR would be the first radar imagingdesigned to observe and understand the natural processes of planet earth. It should be noted that the SAC developed radar will be tested in Ahmedabad’s sky for three months. As per sources, the radar developed by SAC will be fixed on a Beechcraft Super King B 200 — owned by ISRO — for the first flight primarily to ‘understand weather and geographical conditions’ to continue testing further. NISAR mission is a dual frequency (L & S Band) Radar Imaging Satellite. Confirming the development, SAC Directorsaid, “We will test the radar by taking images from about 8km above sea level; the same area will be further studied by scientists from ground level to understand the radar’s accuracy level.This process will continue until the crop season ends in— i.e. another three months. We plan to conduct the same exercise in different parts of the country thereafter.” The test flight will initially concentrate on the outskirts of the city before concentrating on surrounding areas like Sanand, Anand, etc. “The flying is essentially to understand how the radar sees the crops,” said Misra. The data collection and observation will also scientists time to analyse and simulate data from the radar. The mission is schedule for a launch in 2020.