Tejas Bharadwaj
On July 30, 2025, the United States announced 25 percent tariffs on Indian goods, noting India’s purchase of oil and arms from Russia. While diplomatic tensions simmered on the trade front, a cosmic calm prevailed at the Sriharikota launch range. Officials from NASA and ISRO were preparing to launch an engineering marvel into space—the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), marking a significant milestone in the India-U.S. bilateral partnership. Space cooperation has often moved forward in the past despite broader geopolitical tensions.
a multilateral space program that involved Russia and U.S.-led allies, was launched a few years after the Cold War ended. Despite geopolitical rivalries, cooperation in space endured. Strategic partners like the U.S. and India have had their fair share of highs and lows in space cooperation. After the U.S. supported India’s first sounding rocket launch in 1963, the space relationship between the two countries entered a hiatus until the late 1990s, owing to the U.S.’ dual-use concerns on India’s rising space program. Reinvigorated by the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership initiative in 2004 and the creation of a Joint Working Group on Civil Space Cooperation in 2005.
Bilateral space collaboration flourished and scientific breakthroughs followed. The Chandrayaan-1, which hosted NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, detected water molecules on the moon for the first time. The NISAR satellite’s launch is not the usual tech transfer story involving defense primes and public sector undertakings, but, as remarked, “a 50-50 effort,” indicating an acknowledgement of mutual tech prowess. For the first time, both countries equally co-developed a satellite with the most advanced imaging dual-use radar that can map the slightest changes to the Earth’s surface. While NASA developed the long-range L-band radar system, ISRO developed the short-range S-band radar, solar arrays, satellite bus, and launch.
The satellite will orbit the Earth fourteen times a day to observe ice and land surfaces twice every twelve days, and can see through clouds, even during the night. The data extracted will be publicly available and is expected to help predict, understand, and manage natural disasters and the impact of climate change. The two countries have conducted workshops for their respective ecosystem on leveraging the datasets. Notably, this is a program that is expected to last for several decades, beyond administrative changes.
No comments:
Post a Comment