NASA Administrator Bill Nelson to visit ISRO facilities in Bengaluru on Nov 30

Bengaluru, Nov 29: NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Wednesday said he will visit ISRO with India’s first astronaut Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma on Thursday to see the low earth orbit observatory, NISAR, being jointly developed by both space agencies. NASA-ISRO SAR (NISAR) is slated to be launched in the first quarter of 2024, according to NASA officials. NISAR will map the entire globe in 12 days and provide spatially and temporally consistent data for understanding changes in Earth’s ecosystems, ice mass, vegetation biomass, sea level rise, ground water and natural hazards including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and landslides.

“I will join Rakesh tomorrow. We will both see NISAR together. Looking forward to this,” Nelson told reporters during an interaction at the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum here.

Explaining about NISAR, the NASA administrator said there are two separate radars in different bands — one built by India, the other by the US. “NISAR is going to look at changes on anything on the Earth’s surface. If it’s in the water, if it’s in the land such as an earthquake, if it’s in the ice, and of course, unfortunately, we’ve got the melting of ice that’s going on as the Earth heats up,” he said.

Also Read | NASA open to help ISRO build its space station, ferry Indian astronauts to ISS next year “Combined with all the other data that we have coming in from about 25 spacecrafts up there now and three more, along with NISAR, is going to give us a detailed picture of what is happening to Earth and its climate,” he further said. Elaborating on his interest in the NISAR project, Nelson said Earth looks beautiful from Space but it also looks fragile. “You want to become a better steward of this beauty of Mother Nature that is created there in the middle of nothing, and space is nothing.

It’s an airless vacuum that goes on millions and billions of light years and there is Earth,” the space scientist said. Replying to a question on sending Indian astronauts to the International Space Station, Nelson said the details are being worked out. The agreement between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Joe Biden is to help and train Indian astronauts to fly to the space station next year, he said.

Also Read | NASA Administrator Bill Nelson meets Union Minister Jitendra Singh, praises ISRO missions “We expected that it will be late in 2024 or in other words, about a year from now,” the top NASA official said. On the launching system, he said it will take off from the Kennedy Space Centre on a Falcon Nine rocket transporting Dragon spacecraft. Congratulating India on Chandrayaan-3 landing in the unexplored south pole of Moon successfully and also helping to discover the ice crystals on lunar surface, the NASA administrator said the American space agency is planning to explore the southern region of the moon further.

“We are planning to land commercial landers with NASA scientific instruments on the south pole this coming year 2024. “I say congratulations to India, because you’re the first (in lunar south pole). You did it.

And you deserve the credit,” Nelson said. Explaining the reason behind NASA’s interest in the south pole, he said there could be water there. “Next year, we are sending an instrument to the south pole.

The lander will dig down underneath the surface to see if there is water,” the NASA administrator said. According to him, the south pole of the moon could be a fuel station because water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen. “Now you have oxygen to breathe and you have hydrogen for rocket fuel.

So the south pole of the moon could be a gas station. So that’s one of the reasons we want to go to the south pole,” Nelson said. Earlier, interacting with the students at VITM, he said space exploration bridges boundaries as there are no physical boundaries visible from space.

Space explorers come together for the cause of Mother Earth leaving aside their political, religious and racial differences, he said. .