Mars Exploration, Earth Observation The Focus Of Joint US And India Collaboration

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Just days after their respective spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Mars, top officials from NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have signed an agreement vowing to work together on future exploration missions involving the Red Planet, officials at the US space agency have announced.
At the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan signed a charter establishing a joint NASA-ISRO Mars Working Group in order to enhance cooperation between the two organizations, as well as an international agreement detailing how they will join forces on the forthcoming NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission.
“The signing of these two documents reflects the strong commitment NASA and ISRO have to advancing science and improving life on Earth,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement Tuesday. “This partnership will yield tangible benefits to both our countries and the world.”
According to NASA, the Mars Working Group will look to identify and implement new scientific and technological goals that it and the ISRO have in common regarding Mars exploration. The group plans to meet once per year to plan cooperative activities and programs, including potential cooperative future missions to Mars.
On September 21, NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft successfully entered orbit around the Red Planet, making it the first spacecraft dedicated to studying the upper atmosphere of the planet. Two days later, it was joined by ISRO’s Mangalyaan orbiter, allowing India to become the first Asian nation to reach the Red Planet and the only space program to ever successfully accomplish the feat on its first attempt.
One of the objectives of the Mars Working Group will be to explore potential coordinated observations and science analysis between the two vehicles, as well as other current and future Mars missions, the US space agency explained. John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science, said that the two countries had “a long history of collaboration in space science,” and that the new agreements would “significantly strengthen our ties and the science that we will be able to produce as a result.”
In addition, the two agencies have agreed to join forces on the NISAR Earth-observation satellite. NISAR, which is currently scheduled to launch in 2020, will measure the causes and consequences of land surface changes throughout the world, with potential research targets including ecosystem disturbances, ice sheet collapses and natural disasters. The mission is designed to measure subtle changes of the planet’s surface and improve the scientific community’s understanding of the effects of climate change.
“NISAR will be the first satellite mission to use two different radar frequencies (L-band and S-band) to measure changes in our planet’s surface less than a centimeter across,” NASA said. “This allows the mission to observe a wide range of changes, from the flow rates of glaciers and ice sheets to the dynamics of earthquakes and volcanoes.”
Under the terms of the new agreement, the NISAR mission’s L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) will be provided by NASA, along with a high-rate communication subsystem designed for science data, GPS receivers, a solid state recorder, and a payload data subsystem. Their ISRO colleagues, on the other hand, will provide the spacecraft bus, an S-band SAR, the launch vehicle and associated launch services required for the project.
NASA explained that agency scientists had been analyzing SAR mission concepts since the National Academy of Science’s decadal survey of its Earth sciences program in 2007. NASA first developed a partnership with ISRO in 2008, and the partnership has been governed by a framework agreement signed by both agencies at that time.
“This cooperation includes a variety of activities in space sciences such as two NASA payloads – the Mini-Synthetic Aperture Radar (Mini-SAR) and the Moon Mineralogy Mapper – on ISRO’s Chandrayaan-1 mission to the moon in 2008,” the US space agency concluded. “During the operational phase of this mission, the Mini-SAR instrument detected ice deposits near the moon’s northern pole.”
Image 2 (below): NASA Administrator Charles Bolden (left) and Chairman K. Radhakrishnan of the Indian Space Research Organisation signing documents in Toronto on Sept. 30, 2014 to launch a joint Earth-observing satellite mission and establish a pathway for future joint missions to explore Mars. Credit: NASA