Management

The NISAR mission is a collaboration between NASA and Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and marks the first time the two agencies have cooperated on hardware development for an Earth-observing mission. NISAR is jointly managed by a project director at ISRO and a project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, with programmatic oversight by NASA and ISRO. Lead scientists at JPL and ISRO manage a joint science team that guides the scientific planning and review of the mission.

JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. The agency is providing the mission’s L-band SAR, the radar antenna reflector antenna, the deployable boom, and an engineering payload, which includes a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, a power distribution unit, and a payload data subsystem.

The Space Applications Centre — ISRO’s lead center for payload development, located in Ahmedabad — provided the mission’s S-band instrument and is responsible for its calibration, data processing, and development of science algorithms to address the scientific goals of the mission. U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, which leads the ISRO component of the mission, is providing the spacecraft body, or bus, the launch vehicle (through ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre), associated launch services (through ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre), and satellite mission operations (through ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network). The National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad is primarily responsible for S-band data reception and operational products generation and dissemination.

At NASA Headquarters, Sean Duffy is the acting agency administrator. Nicola Fox is the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. Karen St. Germain is the director of the Earth Science Division. Sanghamitra Dutta is program executive for NISAR, and Gerald Bawden is program scientist for the mission.

At NASA JPL, Phil Barela is the project manager, and Paul Rosen is the project scientist.

At ISRO, V Narayanan is the chairman, and M Ganesh Pillai is the scientific secretary. M Sankaran is the director of U R Rao Satellite Centre and Nilesh M Desai is the director of Space Applications Centre.

Chaitra Rao (U R Rao Satellite Centre) is the project director and Rashmi Sharma (Space Applications Centre) is the science team lead.