In the midst of strengthening space relations between India and the US, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced on Wednesday that the agency will train an Indian astronaut for a mission to the International Space Station as early as next year.
Nelson stated, “There is an opportunity to share science,” during a Bengaluru event on Thursday, the day he is scheduled to view the NISAR satellite.
A low-Earth orbit observatory system called Nasa-ISRO SAR (NISAR) was created in collaboration between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization). The satellite, which is about the size of an SUV, is scheduled to launch in January of next year, most likely from India in the first quarter.
Every twelve days, NISAR will map the entire world, providing information on how ecosystems, ice mass, biomass of flora, sea level rise, groundwater, and natural hazards like earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and landslides are changing.
India agreed to join NASA’s Artemis Accords in June of this year with the goal of increasing its share of the global satellite launch market fivefold over the next ten years.
The agreements seek to promote scientific openness and set guidelines for cooperation to prevent detrimental intervention in space and on the moon, thus modernizing and clarifying the fundamentals of the broadly accepted Outer Space Treaty of 1967.