How to Pack a Spacecraft: Science Payload on Earth Science Mission Heads to India
Part of a partnership between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the spacecraft known as NISAR – short for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar – recently moved one step closer to being able to study changes to the land and ice on Earth. Take a behind-the-scenes trip with NISAR Mechanical Integration Lead Scott Nowak into the clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California as he highlights the NISAR team’s work to assemble the satellite’s science instrument payload and to pack it up to ship out to ISRO’s satellite facility in Bengaluru, India. Technicians and engineers there will integrate the instruments into the main body, or bus, of the satellite, and put it through further testing in preparation for a 2024 launch.
For more information on the mission go to: https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/
Transcript
00:05 - Today we are going to get ready to send NISAR on its voyage from JPL to Indian Space Research Organisation in Bangalore, India.
00:14 - That means that we're gonna have to suit up and go on to the clean room floor where my team and I have been working for the past three years to get this thing built.
Come on, let's go.
00:34 - Shouldn't be too surprising what we're doing. We're getting into the airlock then we're going into High Bay 1. This is the direction that we're going to be in when we lift it in the container.
00:47 - OK, the whole thing is a precision instrument. Later on, we are going to have to assemble this thing, basically pick up a two-ton load and put it together with the precision of a surgeon.
1:00 - So what is NISAR? It is the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar. This is the radar payload in the engineering panel. So, it's effectively the heart and brains of the mission. NISAR will use two powerful radars that can detect very small changes in the earth's surface. This allows the mission to observe a wide range of earth processes, from the flow rates of glaciers and ice sheets, to the dynamics of earthquakes and volcanoes.
01:24 - Along with our Indian colleagues, we've been building NISAR here in this facility for the last three years. And it took a whole crew. So, they're not flying to Bangalore in the container but this is the entire crew, from the mechanical team that's going. It takes an army to get us there. 1:40 - When I first came onto the project, this was just a shell of a payload. We had the aluminum and titanium structure with basically nothing in it, and then they've been populating it with electronics and with the radar payload. We brought in a instrument from India, the S-SAR. So that's the S-band radar to our L-SAR, our L-band radar.
02:01 - Since then, we've been testing it and today we're getting ready to put it into the shipping container to send it on to India. Tight fit. So we're gonna be working over the next year with our Indian partners to do the final stages of assembly and test. Thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure being your guide, and I hope to see you when we launch next year.