This he NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), set for launch mission by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation will help monitor the growth of crops from planting to harvest. The data will help farmers in the United States, Indian and gloablly better time plantings and adjust irrigation schedules to the make the most of water and the most precious resource: time.
NISAR's synthetic aperture radar will monitor moisture content of the plants and the soil they grow at a resolution down to plots just 30 feet (10 meters) wide, every 12 days. This will enable farmers to zoom in to observe week-to-week changes on small farms and scientists zoom out to monitor trends. That broader perspective will be useful for authorities managing crops or setting farm policy.
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“It’s all about resource planning and optimizing, and timing is very important when it comes to crops: When is the best time to plant? When is the best time to irrigate? That is the whole game here,” said Narendra Das, a NISAR science team member and agricultural engineering researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Its first-of-a-kind dual-band radar will also measure land deformation from earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes, producing data for disaster response. It will track changes in glaciers and ice sheets as well as monitor growth and loss of forests and wetlands providing insights for scientists studying the global carbon cycle.
The NISAR mission also marks the first 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.