New Delhi: ISRO and NASA have successfully put the world's most expensive civilian Earth imaging satellite NISAR into orbit, which can provide clues about natural disasters.
This is a milestone for global earth science and international space cooperation. It is a crucial step towards delivering life-saving data to communities around the world.
If the mission goes on track by the next monsoon, India will have a huge new watchtower in space that will help predict landslides, glacial lake outbursts and, combined with weather data, also help assess possible cloudbursts.
The country is facing an increasing number of landslides, which is why the satellite is being called a life-saving mission. The world has never seen a watchtower like this before and so disaster managers are hoping that everything goes well for this most important mission.
Launched on July 30, 2025 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on India’s southeast coast, the satellite is a joint operation between the Indian Space Research Organisation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The satellite is a powerful vehicle powered by an indigenous cryogenic engine – a technology once denied to India but now a symbol of its space prowess. Weighing over 2.8 tonnes and costing $1.3 billion, it is the most expensive Earth observation satellite ever built.
Its mission: to detect small changes – down to fractions of an inch – in the Earth’s surface caused by earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, glacier movements and forest degradation. The data it collects will be vital for disaster preparedness, infrastructure monitoring and climate resilience.