NASA administrator to travel to India to meet with officials and scientists

Beginning Monday, NASA administrator Bill Nelson will travel to India and the United Arab Emirates for a series of meetings with senior government leaders.

Nelson will also meet with space officials from both countries to enhance bilateral cooperation in a wide variety of innovation and research-related sectors, particularly human exploration and Earth science, according to a release from the American space agency NASA.

Nelson’s journey to India will fulfill a pledge made as part of President Joe Biden’s US-India partnership on ‘Critical and Emerging Technology’.

Nelson will go to numerous places in India, including the Bengaluru-based facility where the NISAR spacecraft, a cooperative Earth-observing mission between NASA and its Indian partner ISRO, is being tested and integrated in preparation for launch in 2024.

NISAR is an abbreviation for NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar.

NISAR is a revolutionary Earth-observing instrument, the first in the Earth System Observatory, that will measure Earth’s changing ecosystems, dynamic surfaces, and ice masses, providing information about biomass, natural hazards, sea level rise, and groundwater, critical information to guide efforts related to climate change, hazard mitigation, agriculture, and more.

NISAR is a joint venture between NASA and ISRO, and it is the first time the two organizations have worked together on hardware development for an Earth-observing mission.

The satellite’s cylindrical radar sensor payload, about the size of an SUV and partially coated in gold-colored thermal blanketing, has two radar systems.

Laurie Leshin, director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), recently said that scientists from both space agencies — ISRO and NASA — are collaborating on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission to make the most of the data that will be transmitted from the spacecraft.

Leshin went on to say, “We are so excited to be working between NASA and ISRO on NISAR, which is a radar machine to looks at the surface of the earth and how it is changing. In India, they are interested in understanding how the mangrove environment at the coasts is changing”.

“We will understand how ice sheets are changing and how earthquakes and volcanoes are happening all over the world…There are many different aspects to understanding our earth better”, Leshin added.

Nelson will also attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2023 while in the UAE. The conference will be attended for the first time by a NASA administrator.

Additionally, during the tour, students from each country will have the opportunity to meet with Nelson to discuss STEM education and their roles as members of the Artemis Generation.

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