NASA Administrator Bill Nelson met the Union Minister for Science and Technology Dr. Jitendra Singh on Tuesday to discuss India’s research interests during the joint mission to the International Space Station (ISS) next year for which the U.S. will be training an Indian astronaut.
“We discussed what the Indian astronaut would do on the International Space Station. And we talked about the things that are important to India in scientific research, which the Indian astronaut ought to have as a choice,” Mr. Nelson said during a media roundtable here. The joint mission to the space station is planned for the end of 2024.
The collaboration was announced by U.S. President Joe Biden during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bilateral visit in June during which India also signed the Artemis Accords—a non-binding set of principles designed to guide civil space exploration and use.
The NASA Administrator is in India beginning November 27 to hold a series of meetings. He will be in Mumbai to meet representatives of Indian space companies and will meet Indian astronaut Rakesh Sharma in Bengaluru. Mr. Nelson will also visit facilities in Bengaluru where the NISAR spacecraft, a joint Earth-observing mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is undergoing testing and integration for launch in 2024.
NISAR is short for NASA ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar. The NISAR will be launched in the first quarter of 2024.
“The NISAR is part of the Great Observatories. A combination of 4-5 observatories, plus all of our 25 spacecraft, will help us precisely determine what is happening to the earth’s surface and its climate. It will use technology that measures any change on the surface such as land as a result of an earthquake, or disturbance on the water or movement of ice on the planet,” Mr. Nelson said about the joint venture.
NASA is providing the NISAR mission’s L-band synthetic aperture radar, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder and payload data subsystem. ISRO is providing the spacecraft bus, the S-band radar, the launch vehicle and associated launch services.
