Mark Simons (left), Professor of Geophysics, Caltech and Gerald W Bawden, programme manager, natural hazards research, Earth Science Division, NASA
Now that NISAR is successfully in orbit, it’s not just the research community but also enterprises and start-ups that stand to gain by the huge wealth of data that the first-of-its-kind dual band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite will send back.
Speaking to businessline a day after the launch, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) representatives, part of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, said that NISAR is producing about 42 terabits of raw data per day and if leveraged right, this can give rise to a new community of start-ups and businesses.
Commercial enterprises can use the output as a kind of reconnaissance tools and then reprocess things at a higher resolution to solve specific issues and problems, they said.
“If you take a look at all the data that NASA has collected in the solar system, from Mercury to Pluto… NISAR is going to be collecting three times that volume in the first year,” Gerald W Bawden, programme manager, natural hazards research, Earth Science Division, NASA, said.
“We are imaging almost the whole world at five by six metre resolution twice every 12 days. So this is an incredible opportunity for the commercial sector to come in and find opportunities in this wealth of data,” he added.
NISAR is the first satellite to have dual frequency bands, one made by NASA and the other Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The satellite can detect the movement of land and ice surfaces down to the centimetre. The data NISAR collects also can help assess how forests, wetlands, agricultural areas, and permafrost change over time.
Now that NISAR is launched, it is going to go through a 90-day commissioning phase, Bawden explained.
“So over the next 90 days, NISAR is going to continue flying up to a higher elevation to get to what we call a reference science orbit, and that is 747 kilometres.” After checking that it’s working well, the teams will then start taking some test data, and 90 days from now, NISAR will go into operational mode.
Commercial benefits
In terms of commercial benefits, the NASA representatives expect agriculture, coastal development, disaster response and water resources study to be among key use cases.
In a boost for academia and start-ups, the data delivered by NISAR will be all open and free.
“One of the extraordinary things with NISAR and in all missions that NASA is involved with is that all data is free and open to everybody on the globe,” Mark Simons, Professor of Geophysics, Caltech and a part of NISAR mission team, said.
“It provides an opportunity to ambitious people to think about opportunities for value-added products,” he added.
Bawden added that there’s a lot of opportunities for start-ups in agriculture, infrastructure stability and safety.
Speaking about the uniqueness of the first joint NASA-ISRO partnership, the scientists said that when two agencies work together, each builds a part of the technology, but this is the first mission where both built parts that have to work well together.
“With both agencies having a rich history in synthetic aperture, it was a natural marriage,” Bawden said.
Future collaborations
Has the mission given rise to more opportunities for the two space agencies to come together?
Bawden notes that there are areas which NASA and ISRO are working on with human spaceflight being one.
“But right now my team is focused on getting the SAR up and going, and we’re not looking that far down the road as of yet,” he added.
“It’s easy to focus on hardware. But what this mission has done is introduced a large number of scientists to each other who did not know each other before, which is a true investment in the long-term future,” Simons said.
Published on July 31, 2025
