0:00 [Music] Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in listenial mode into the question and answer session at today's conference. At that time, you may press star one on your phone to ask a question. Like to inform all parties to if you have any questions or I would like now to turn the conference to Veron McGregor. Thank you. You may begin. Hi, good morning and welcome to today's NISAR pre-launch teleconference. I'm Veronica McGregor with the news office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and I'll be your moderator today. NISAR is a joint mission by NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization, also known as ISRO, that will monitor Earth's dynamic surface. The full mission name is the NASA ISRO synthetic aperture
0:47 radar, but we'll just refer to it as NISAR today. We're now two days away from launch with launch being provided by ISRO at their Satish Dawan Space Center in Sri Har located on the southeast coast of India. NICER team members from JPL and NASA are in India in anticipation of launch set for 8:07 a.m. Eastern time, 5:07 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday, July 30th. They are joining us from India today to talk about the mission's important science, the collaboration between ISRO and NASA and to provide details on the launch itself. Quickly before I hand it over to the panelists, I want to remind members of the media on the phone line that you can ask a question by pressing star one and you'll be entered into the queue.
1:33 For our other listeners who would like to submit a question, you can do it via social media by using the ask NICAR hashtag. So that's# asknarr. Joining us today we have Karen St. Germaine, director of earth science at NASA. Gerald Boden, NISAR program scientist at NASA, Shaina Mlan, program applications lead for NISAR from NASA. Phil Burella, the NISAR project manager from JPL, and Marco Laval, the NISAR deputy project scientist at JPL. And we really appreciate that they're joining us at 9:30 p.m. local time in
2:18 India. It's a 12 and a half hour time difference between us here in California. And we know that they've already had a very long day, but exciting day. As you can see, we did not have a representative from ISRA joining us on this call. They were of course welcomed and invited but sent regrets due to their very busy pre-launch schedule and their deadlines as we get closer to launch day. And now I will turn it over to Karen St. Germaine, the director of Earth Science at NASA. Good evening from India. It is great to be with you at such an exciting time. We are two nations with one mission. NISAR unites the US and India to study our home planet together. NASA studies the Earth as a system.
3:05 And as the first image is going to show you, today we have more than two dozen missions in orbit studying our oceans, land, ice, atmosphere, and life on our planet. Yet, we get a far greater understanding of how the Earth works when we look at the data from all of these missions together. Because together we can observe how a change in one aspect of the earth may drive change in others. Even small and subtle change can mean a significant difference across the entire Earth system. We are launching NISAR, the most sophisticated radar we've ever built. NASA undertakes this groundbreaking mission in partnership with ISRO.
3:51 The science of NISAR will advance our understanding of the Earth system with cutting edge technology capable of studying changes in land and ice changes as small as a centimeter in any weather and in both darkness and light. So why is this important? Let's uh roll the B-roll. Some change happens uh sorry this is important because we know that our planet surface undergoes constant and meaningful change. Some change happens slowly, some happens abruptly. Some changes are large while some are subtle. With NISAR, we will see the precursors to natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and volcanoes. We'll see
4:36 land substance and swelling, movement, deformation, and melting of mountain glaciers and ice sheets covering both Greenland and Antarctica. And of course, we'll see wildfires. We'll also see humaninduced land changes such as farm and ranch production, use of water for municipal drinking and farm irrigation, and infrastructure and land development, houses, commercial buildings, railroads, highways, and bridges. We will put NICAR science and observations to work guiding and informing decisions so we can abundantly feed ourselves, safely build housing and transportation systems, and better prepare for and respond to natural hazards. I'm also really proud to highlight NISAR
5:22 as a terrific example of NASA's unique endto-end capability. From inventing new technologies to building missions, our science reveals the previously unseen and we deliver those insights to help inform decisions. As an international partnership built on open science principles, NISAR is a model for the next generation of Earth observation capability. India built the spacecraft bus and the Sband radar and is providing the launch vehicle launch services and satellite mission operations. NASA's JPL built the Lband radar and the mission's radar reflector and boom. NASA's also providing a high rate communication
6:09 subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid state recorder, and the payload uh data subsystem. Finally, I want to recognize the leadership of Israel and NASA JPL team. Look, building a satellite on opposite sides of the world uh during a global pandemic was really hard, but it strengthened our relationship with ISRO. The collaboration, the cooperation, information sharing, and frankly joint learning between our two agencies is a foundation that we look forward to continuing to build upon. Go NICAR. And now I'd like to introduce Gerald Boden, NICAR program scientist from NASA
6:54 headquarters. Gerald, over to you. Uh, thank you Karen. Thank you so much. And it's exciting to be here in India on uh two days before we're launching. NISAR is going to be the first ever satellite to use two-ofa-kind radar that will operate together to study the earth and our processes. Uh NISAR is going to image the solid earth, the living earth and the frozen earth and actually so much more than I have time to talk about here. So first let's talk about the solid earth. Nice fire remains are changes in the land surface globally on average about once a week. The solid earth covers earthquakes, volcanic unrest, landslides, land subsidance, any process that actually moves the land by either millimeters, we're talking sub sub inch um out to kilometers. So, we're
7:40 dealing with miles. We'll be able to go and track all these types of motions. Plate tectonics is responsible for shaping the earth over eons. And these uh landscapes continue to change every day, but often imperceptible to the human eye. This is where NISAR comes in. NISAR will measure almost all the lands uh in the world and will be able to go and detect changes in positions less than a centimeter, less than a quarter of inch. These changes uh could be associated with a fault slowly accumulating stress before an earthquake, magma migrating from depths beneath a volcano that may or may not trigger an eruption, or landslides that begin to slip before a catastrophic failure. The animation that you see up on the screen right now is looking at Los Angeles in Southern California. You
8:26 can actually see the colors where we rise up where red is where it's up high, blue is where it's down low. It's rising and falling about uh up an inch and down another inch. So, we got two inches that it's moving up and down. This is all due to groundwater pumping. If you notice on the left side of the image right now, you got some black lines on there. These are faults. That's a Newport fault. And the um the deformation from groundwater pumping is actually concentrated on the faults. This could either mimic an earthquake or it could mask it, make it harder to understand if these faults are getting closer to to failure. So NISAR is going to be able to help us do this but globally in all different types of conditions. Um the living earth
9:12 will measure nearly all the living earth twice every 12 days. the living earth are the plants, the crops, the forests, the lakes, the cities, the coastal regions. So, if I could get the next image up, uh NISAR's uh two radars, it's the Lband provided by NASA and the Sband from uh ISRO are excellent at measuring crops. The SAR, it's a shorter wavelength and is able to really look as the growth of many crops like soybean, corn, and things along those lines. The Lband, the longer wavelength is fantastic at looking at, I'll say, your tree crops or your um almonds and just looking at at trees growth or forestry perspective, looking at tree inventories. And so the image that we're looking at on the screen is that in
9:57 southern Florida, that's Lake Okachchobee. All the blue squares, this kind of quilt work, hatch work, uh length center, those are all sugar cane fields. Each one of them is actually in a different stage of growth, different stage of being harvested. And the different color patterns that we see here are from N from NICAR like data from radar data that we're able to look at and be able to actually begin estimating what will the crop production be for these types of crops. So this is just southern Florida. Take this worldwide. If we've got clouds in areas, we'll be able to actually penetrate through the clouds. the frozen earth. If we get the graphic up for Antarctica, that would be wonderful. The frozen earth are the glaciers, the ice sheets, the sea ice, the perafrost. Nice will
10:44 image uh nearly all of the Earth's frozen surfaces get twice every 12 days. Um we'll be able to answer questions basically how fast are the ice sheets moving, are they advancing, are they retreating? Well, they'll be able to measure how um much snow is being accumulated in some of the areas. This all provides vital information to the cryosspheric uh community to better understand the complexities of these eye sheets. What we're looking up on the screen right now is an image of Antarctica. This is produced uh by scientists and this took over 10 years to go ahead and generate uh this particular image. What you're looking at is actually rivers of ice. Just think of this as rivers. And the wider they get, so the blue the blues and h into magentas are rivers that are
11:30 actually moving fast. This is ice that's being dumped into uh the ocean and we're able to see exactly where it is, how and how fast they're moving. It took 10 years here. Nice will be able to go ahead and produce this twice a month and so we're going to be able to look at much subtler things that we've ever been able to do with um with NICAR. Um NIAR will be the most advanced radar system that NASA has put into space. And NASA actually has a long history of working with um SARC. We actually launched the very first SAR satellite for uh civilian for science and applications the world saw back in 1978 was sees. Um can you show uh the animation please?
12:16 The amount of data that NISAR is going to collect in it the first year we take a look at what's been collected in the univer in the solar system. So this is NASA from Mercury to Pluto and at the time they're here in 2017 45 years of LANCAT. Nixar is going to be three times that volume in the very first year. And so no other mission earth observing mission has collected as much data. The graphic that you're seeing up on the screen is actually showing um simulating what NISAR's orbit's going to look like at going around the Earth. And you can see we go from the South Pole to the North Pole down south pole. And when you talk about doing uh imaging earth twice every 12 days, it's either coming climbing going from the south pole to north or back down. It's an incredible
13:02 satellite that's got will be just covering so much data. So NIER is important for me. I'm responsible for all the science that that comes out of uh NASA. So I'm obviously excited about everything that um NISAR will be able to go ahead and produce. There are listeners on right now that don't yet realize how much of a game changer the NISAR is going to be for them. My hope is once people start using NISAR data that they're not going to imagine time without NISAR being able to help address their issues and be able to help them out. We produced a lot of different products, algorithms, computer programs, and everything that's going to really help everybody do their science and be able to answer questions relevant to them. So NIAR, go NICAR. With that, I want to go ahead and hand things over to
13:47 Dr. Shaya Mcclelay. Thank you very much, Gerald. So, I'm going to talk now briefly about the applications of NISAR. From fire, flood to food security. NISAR will help communities plan for and act on a range of critical decisions. For example, in January of this year, there were extensive fires across LA County, California. This is in the these are the Palisades and Eaton fires impacting over 150,000 people including many of our colleagues from the Jet Propulsion Lab and from our NISAR science team. With this image appearing on the screen, we can now see on the left the hyperspectral imagery from the Averest instrument that assesses the amount of hazardous char and ash remaining after
14:34 the fires. And on the right we have an AI supported SAR-based Sentinel one image identifying the number of medical and health facilities impacted by the fire. By bringing these images together, we can have a narrative of both the health related needs of the community and the available services in the area. With the NSAR mission, we can expect to see more improved damage assessments of critical infrastructure such as roads and energy grids, telecommunication lines, as well as homes and businesses. Beyond fires, NISAR will also provide crucial information on flood risk assessment and recovery. Just three weeks ago, extensive flash flooding impacted the
15:19 Texas Hill Country beginning the morning of July 4th. In the first few days of the floods, first responders were largely blind to the significant cloud cover that prevented the use of optical imagery and where no SAR passes were available. For this image that we currently see in red, we see the sheer intensity of rainfall in the area with the IMUge data. But to really understand what was happening on the ground, we were able to fly an airborne SAR-based asset referred to as UAV SAR to provide information on the extent of the floods across the impacted regions. This is the image that we see now. The image we see here is actually the most representative of the type of imagery we can expect to
16:05 see from NISAR. And while UAVS provided critical um information for supporting emergency responders, NICER will also be a gamecher for ensuring communities recover faster from floods by answering questions regarding how fast flood waters will recede, whether there's damage to people's homes, and whether the roadways that take them home are accessible. Beyond disasters, NISAR provides a range of information as previously mentioned on ecosystems, the cryossphere, and food security. And for those working across the agricultural and land management sectors, NISAR's soil moisture products can aid in estimating crop production and health and also support drought
16:51 monitoring and assessment. The change detection capability of NIAR will also aid in understanding the extent of crops that are impacted by a range of hazards including wind, tornadoes, and hail. Here we see optical imagery from LANCAT 9 of the damage from wind and hail to croplands in Garden City, Kansas in 2023. Just imagine what NISAR will show us. And while NICER will not predict fire, flood or drought events, it will clearly address the needs for assessing risk to communities. It will also enable rapid recovery and put us on the path to strengthening our ability to build a more resilient future. So when I think about NISAR and why the mission is
17:36 important to me, it's not just the range of societal benefits that it will be providing to communities around the world. It's also the fact that there are once the data becomes available, there will be so many people looking to make the NICAR data very personal to them to the stories of impact that they're experiencing. And so being able to see what opportunities um and the range of no novel applications that each one will bring to us uh is is just thrilling. So I'll now turn things over to Phil Burella, the NISAR project manager. Thank you Shaina. I'm going to talk about NISAR's readiness to launch. And I'm very happy to say that we are ready
18:22 to launch and launch is scheduled as you heard this Wednesday. Uh we just got back from ISRO having high level meetings at uh with ISRO and NASA and both teams agreed that the spacecraft and the mission and the launch vehicle is ready to go. So everybody gave a thumbs up and that's great news. Uh the range looks good, weather looks good. It looks like the launch will happen this Wednesday. So we're very excited about that. Um if you queue up the photo there, I'll show you status of where we were about a week ago. You see the spacecraft being encapsulated inside the fairing there on the left. If you see that black square in the front left of the spacecraft, that's one of the solar panels. You'll see the other solar panel, the tip of it on the other side. And then that cylindrical object in the top right on the spacecraft is the
19:08 reflector. And you're going to see both of these deploy in just a minute here. It's very exciting. And then earlier this week, they rolled the spacecraft on top of the launch vehicle out to the launchpad. And that's where it sits tonight, awaiting its launch Wednesday. So on Wednesday, the team's going to be spread out across the globe. We're going to have a team NASA will have a team at the SHA launch facility observing and supporting the launch. We'll also have a team of about 20 folks at ISRO's ISTRA, their mission operations facility in Bangalore. In addition to that, at JPL's mission operations facility, we'll have staff there ready to support the launch uh once the separation from the launch vehicle occurs. Okay, so launch is exciting, but what
19:53 happens after launch and the milestones that we have in the weeks following launch are very exciting. I'm going to walk you through some of those. We have about a 90-day commissioning period, at which point we'll calibrate the instruments. We'll deploy, and I'll show you some of that right now. Some of the key milestones immediately after launch is that separation from the spacecraft will occur about 20 minutes uh after liftoff. And then we'll get an what we call an acquisition of a signal uh from the spacecraft and that will occur pretty much about the same time about 20 minutes. And what you're watching right now, the solar array is being deployed. And now we're going to start deploying the boom for the reflector is the first joint. This will happen about 10 days after launch. This deployment will go on for about eight days and then it'll be complete.
20:39 And so what you're watching right now is a a 9 m roughly 27 foot uh refle uh boom being deployed and it's going through its final hinge deployment right now. And what you're going to see in a minute here is the reflector start its bloom, what we call the bloom or its deployment. That was based on its stored energy. And now you're going to see it being reeled in with some spooler motors that we have on. At this point, NISAR is ready to start collecting science and we will continue to calibrate the instruments at this point. Pop up to our science orbit and begin collecting science. Let me uh reflect now that you have understand where the spacecraft status is. Uh let me ceue up the uh animation
21:25 please showing the buildup of of NISAR. I'd like to reflect back on the the build. We've been at this over a decade with our partner ISRO and it's been a phenomenal journey. Uh as Karen mentioned, this is this is a largecale partnership between ISRO and NASA and a first of its kind. And as also as Karen mentioned, both the the amount that we have learned from each other during this period has just been phenomenal. Both teams are in a rhythm now. uh during the height of COVID we had about 65 engineers come out from ISRO and and visit JPL and work to keep the integration and test going and over the last two and a half years uh NASA has sent out uh over 175 engineers to ISRO's facilities to keep the integration and test going and get us ready for uh where
22:11 we stand today and ready for launch. Both teams are eagerly awaiting and anticipating getting into this very busy sequence that I just showed you of the activities post launch. Uh but more importantly and I think even beyond the folks that have worked and contributed to NISAR is the scientists and people around the globe that are going to benefit from this transformative science and that is really the exciting part. So when I think about today a couple days before launch what's going through my mind it's been a wonderful journey uh we've had a wonderful partnership uh both within NASA and with our partner Israel of course I'm anticipating a lot of very happy people uh not only in the US but in India not only those of us
22:57 again that have contributed but also the rest of the the world that is going to benefit from this science that Nasar is going to produce and to tell you a little bit more about that science I'm going to turn over to Marco. Thank you, Phil. It's very exciting to be here so close to launch. So, we have just heard about all the amazing things that Nicer will do. Um, and I'd like to go a little bit more into the in the details about u the uh radar operations, how the radar works and what the data will actually look like in practice. So, NICER carries two powerful radar systems. They're operated at two different wavelengths and together they will give a comprehensive vision of the land and ice cover surfaces in all weather conditions day and night. So we heard that NISA will revisit the same
23:42 location about once a week. But it also delivers unprecedented details. So very high resolution imagery and in the first animation if we can do it I'll show you how that is achieved. So NICER uses a technique called synthetic aperture radar or SAR as it flies along its orbit. NICER basically sends out thousands of harmless radar pulses every second. These cover very um wide swat on the ground hundreds of miles across. These pulses basically bounce off the earth's surface and return signal that carry information about structure and conditions. And that's what is used by the scientists to understand how the surface changed over time. Now these initial radar returns on their own are blurry. You can see actually an
24:28 example in the upper right corner of that animation but nicer combines them to generate an image as as if it was taken by a much larger antenna. One that would be miles wide if it existed in practice physically. And this is why it's called synthetic aperture radar. We essentially synthesize a larger antenna in space to achieve high resolution from the motion of the satellite. By doing this we obtain a sharp high resolution image um from very very uh far above the surface 750 km above the earth surface. Uh and of course the more pulses you integrate the sharper the image gets as you can see again in the upper right corner u of the animation. In the second animation we see uh what nicer can do uh
25:14 even further. Uh so this is where things become interesting in my opinion. NICER can measure how the surface changed over time. So basically in three dimensions um in this animation you're seeing California's central valley sinking several feet per year in some areas. Um and that is due to the groundwater uh pumping. So NICER captures this motion using a technique called radar interferometry which basically compares radar images taken at different times. In the case of NISER it's about 12 days. Um, and that is sort of like using radar in the high precision yard sticks from space. Now, in the next image, if you can load it, uh, we see what an interferoggram looks like. Uh, so you see dark black areas, that's water, and
26:03 you see colored stripes. These stripes indicate where and by how much the ground has moved. Where stripes are close to each other, that means that the ground has moved uh by a larger amount. Um and this is uh in this particular case a consequence of the volcanic activity. The volcano is actually in the center of the image in the tip of that leaf shaped uh pattern that you see in the image. Um this is called radar interpherometry technique. In the next image um you see a different technique called radar polarity that has to do with the orientation of the electromagnetic waves. So radar polarry is implemented by niser. It's very useful for um studying the structure of the land cover that we're seeing. In this particular case, we're imaging with a near instrument uh the Amazon forest.
26:51 Again, black is water, a river running across the image. Uh green is intact forest. Uh so that's the canopy um that is penetrated by the radar waves and reddish color reveals the water under the vegetation. This is an example of how the penetration capability of the radar are really important uh for understanding what is going on on the surface. This is cannot be achieved uh by looking at radar sorry at optical images um on the left hand side where you basically see clouds in fact optical uh images do not penetrate clouds and forest cover. And this is probably one of the things that most excites me about NISER, the combination of radar
27:36 interferometry and polarimetry to study how ecosystems change. We just published a paper, a method to estimate tree height uh from interferometric and polar images and we're really excited to look at um how that method um applies to nicer data and reveals about our changing forests. Uh this is only one example of of what NICER can do. There will be much more and we're really eager to uh put our hand on the data. Back to you. All right. Thank you uh to our panelists and we're going to go to uh questions now. Um we've got uh several good ones coming in from social media. So I will start with those. Um again if you are
28:22 for listeners who want to submit a question via social media you can do so by using the ask nicer ask narr hashtag and for members of the media on the phone line if you want to ask a question please press star one and you'll be put into the queue uh coming from a question from Anish Mishra on YouTube asks nitar is being called the most advanced radar system ever launched by NASA or ISRA What specific breakthroughs in radar technology does NISA represent compared to previous missions? And I'll let any of you in the room go ahead and answer that. Yeah, this is Michael. I can take it. Um, so, uh, NISAR has two radar
29:09 wavelengths. Uh, so that is a, uh, definitely a an important feature. Um, and it's a breakthrough. We're using a a reflector an antenna reflector um that itself um is also a technology innovation. Um but for the science which is really uh something I I work on uh that uh reflector allows us to implement a technique called sweepsar which um gives very high resolution uh and that itself is is really a breakthrough um in the radar technology. In fact, we have uh we know that there are upcoming missions uh missions that are in development that will implement a similar technique. So in that regard, NISER uh will be a firstofits-kind mission to implement that um uh that
29:55 high resolution capability with with a new um sweepstar technique. All right, thank you. Um as as as actually our other panelists are pointing out is a combination of global and high resolution and global um mapping. U that's actually the key. Yes, that will will be uh done by Okay, thanks. Uh we're going to go to the phone line next and we have Kenneth Chang from the New York Times. Go ahead. Hi, thank you. Uh this is for Terrence and Germaine. Um you were saying that part of the uh power of NISAR comes from the fleet of Earth observing satellites that you have. Um and in that nice
30:43 animation you have um the administration is proposing cancelling at least four of those. So I was wondering how much is that going to affect your abilities if you if aqua um or OCO2 and OCO3 are turned off. And I was also had a question for Phil Burella. There was a issue with the um antenna last year that where had to be sent back to uh JPL. Could you just recap what the issue was and how you fixed it and how confident that it's going to work as designed? Thank you. All right. This is Karen. I will take the first question. So um so the uh the animation you saw is a snapshot of the fleet today. Over time um it is uh it is
31:33 very much the case that some satellites retire, new ones come on and I should also mention this is only showing the NASA fleet. We also combine data with uh with data from other international partners uh around the world. So um what we're looking to do is exploit uh all of the data that we have access to at any given time and in any snapshot in time that available data will be different uh you know on one day as compared to um you know uh years later. uh with regard to Aqua Terra and Aora uh specifically those missions are approaching the end of their their life.
32:20 They're already in drifting orbits um and uh so the science were able to do with them is already changing um as compared to the first 20 years and and actually I really celebrate what those missions have been able to accomplish over more than 20 years of service. uh but that's changing as they reach the end of life. We will uh combine NASA data with a wide variety of uh data of of all different types of all different measurement techniques. Think over to Phil. Yes. Hi, this is Phil Burella to your second question. So the reflector as you point out was found to uh have some
33:06 concern on our part for its optical properties and this would have resulted in potentially the reflector bonded joints and other uh components of part of the reflector getting too warm. And so we did send it back to Southern California and we changed those optical properties very methodically. We walked through the entire reflector and made sure we had plenty of robust margins on everything else. And then we shipped it back, integrated, and you saw it there in the photo about to be encapsulated. So, we're ready to fly. Okay, we're going to take our next question from Jeff Faustst of Space News. Go ahead, Jeff. Good afternoon. Um question for the the
33:51 NASA part of the the uh the NICAR team. I'm curious beyond sort of the obvious obstacles like distance and time zones, what sort of challenges you had um working with ISRO on NISAR, but also maybe some unexpected benefits of the cooperation uh to enable the spacecraft to finally make it to the launch pad. Thank you. Wow. It's a it's a long list. As I mentioned in my summary, uh I think we've acknowledged both teams. We've just learned so much from each other. And this is the first time, as I mentioned, we've worked this intimately where they spent, you know, years at our facility and us now years at their facility. So, it's a very long list. Uh really some wonderful examples. uh I
34:37 won't get into details here but the way they solve problems the way they approach a problem uh is is somewhat different depending on the area than than we do and so we really observe that and I think there's a lot of benefits there's a lot of lessons we can take back and we've heard them say the same thing about us uh you know some of the ways we do business are very different from them they're taking that back looking at it uh so you know the the challenges was really getting used to those differences and appreciating them and the teams teams I think really to their credit uh remained with open minds and we got into this rhythm at the end as I mentioned that uh it is a you know extremely powerful team at this point and uh wouldn't trade it for the world.
35:26 All right, thanks Phil. Um we're going to go to our next question from Bruce Einhorn from Bloomberg News. Hi everyone, this is a question for the whole team. Um could you put um could you provide info on the cost of the project? A lot of the media reports uh have said that uh the price tag is an estimated $1.5 billion. Is that correct? And if not, what is the right number? And also is uh is it possible to say what percentage is from NASA? What percentage is from ISRO? Karen, would you like to take that? And if I don't know if we have the graphic uh available that shows the contributions from the two countries, but go ahead, Karen.
36:12 Yeah, if we if we've got that graphic, it'd be great to show it. So, the the uh the NASA contribution over the um expected life uh expected primary life of the mission is is about 1.2 billion. Um and you know when it comes to uh the the Israel costs uh I what I would say there is Israel has a different uh business model a different way of of of accounting for costs and so forth. So it's really uh really uh difficult it would be difficult for for me to draw a uh a comparison or conclusions based on the money. So I think the more uh informative way to actually talk about the contributions of our two countries
36:57 is actually shown in the graphic here where you can see that there were very equitable contributions um uh by NASA and ISRO. Uh I walked through them uh earlier, but you know the the uh deployable that large deployable it's a it's almost a 40 foot antenna almost 40 foot in diameter antenna and the uh the boom that supports it and all of those mechanisms and the the LBN SAR um as well as a variety of other smaller components uh were delivered by NASA. And then of course on the ISRO side um the S-band radar is the the you know the other part of the instrumentation and then all of the supporting uh functions
37:44 the spacecraft bus the solar arrays uh and the the launch and operations. So uh equitable uh and and completely joint and integrated mission. Um but uh yeah that's I think oh Gerald you want to add something? Yeah, this is Gerald. Um we we talked about cost of the mission but we've talked about what is that buying I'll say the world. NISAR as I described is basically collecting more data than any other NASA mission ever to uh planet Earth and by a large amount again three times uh the volume uh than what was collected in the solar system. And so with that we are going I imagine being able to go ahead and collect data I'll
38:30 say 5 meters by six meters. So we're looking at 5 yards by 6 yards there or a little bit of yard on every square section of Earth twice every 12 days. That is a lot of data. Actually if you start looking at what the cost of that data is just over 3 years it's going to only cost about two cents per square kilometer I square mile for that data. No other mission has actually that cheap of data. We're able to go ahead and do science actually very economically. We're able to do science that were not possible without this. Yes, the upfront costs are high, but the scientific dividend and the scientific costs per square uh mile is cheaper than anything
39:19 else that's out there. So, it's a it's amazing that we're able to do that actually on this mission that only costs this much. All right, we'll move on to the next question that will be from Gorbier Singh, an author based in the UK. Thank you very much. And can I start by saying acknowledging all the hard work that you guys in NASA and your colleagues in Israel have put into the United something and consequential. My question is about the data download. Um the presskit says that all Sband and
40:07 Lband data would be available to Indian government users through Israel's National Remote Sensing Center. So does that mean that the SBAN data will not be available publicly from ISRO's national remote sensing center as NASA's Elban data will be? Um this is Gerald. I'll go ahead and work with that. Um all all the data from NISAR this is the Alban data that NASA is collecting that will be available through the Alaska satellite facility for no charge. All of ISRA's SBAN data will also be available through their Bhindi system um and potentially get a
40:53 link um up uh in the chat at some point. Um they are in Israel is actually providing the data free and open. We actually had a meeting today where they were going over exactly what they are providing and it's going to be a wonderful data set. So where is collecting the SR data? It's not quite global. Most of the data is actually being collected over India and then we have parts in the United States, mostly the western United States. And then we have some different sites around the world. We've got the Congo in Africa. We've got the Amazon rainforest. We've got some glaciers. But more importantly, we're also imaging all of Antarctica, Greenland, and I'll say some of the northern sea ice north of Alaska where
41:40 they're collecting data in both the Lband and Sband. Actually, whatever Sband data is being collected, we're also collecting the Lband data. And so, this can be a very rich data source that's free and open there. But with ISRO, you've got to go ahead and go to their system, their NRSC, National um remote sensing center to their system there. You got to log in, create an account, and then you'll have the same access that everyone else will have there. All right. Uh, our next question comes from Alexandra Witzy from Nature Magazine. Go ahead, Alexandra. Hi, thanks for taking my question. This is for um Karen St. Germaine. I want to follow up a bit on Ken's earlier question about kind of future missions
42:27 and the way the future of NASA Earth Science Fleet might look. Uh so you talked about missions that are sort of end of life and u maybe will be turned off soon, but NISAR is also supposed to be the trailblazer for Earth System Observatory future missions meeting uh decal survey priorities from the community. uh and NASA's budget request would not for next year would not uh continue formulation of any of those future Earth system observatory missions. So what's lost if we have you know this great mission like NISAR we're hearing about today if we don't have get to have big future missions like that following it? Yeah, thanks thanks for the question. Um
43:12 you know the the uh the the budget process is uh is playing out and uh and you know our our commitment our passion is to do the most advanced science we can do with the budget we're allocated. So once we have clarity um we will move forward with um with with planning for the future missions and uh and we are of course uh uh hoping for a very long uh nice long life for for NISAR and some of our other missions that we recently launched that are uh likewise breakthrough missions. I'm thinking of principally SWAT and PACE. Uh so we're we are uh we think that we are actually
43:58 entering um a pretty rich golden age of of new types of data that can answer questions we've never been able to answer before. And we will look forward to moving out on uh on building the future missions uh once we have a little more clarity on on um on the direction from uh uh Congress and the administration. Okay, I'm going to give you a question from WXTIS on YouTube. Um, what are the challenges of managing NISAR's high data rate from dual frequency large swap imaging and how does the ground segment ensure timely data delivery?
44:46 This is Phil Burella. It it is a challenge uh 37 terabits per day uh daily downlink volume and then that's that's unprocessed. Once we process it, it becomes even more more voluminous. So there's really only one way to transfer effectively that type of data. Uh we have four ground stations, four NASA ground stations being used for the Lband. We have two ground stations being used for the Sband radar. So each pass they will downlink their aotted uh amount of data to those stations. those stations integrate it and then they send it to the cloud and so post-process um that information that's sent to the cloud would be in the repositories that Gerald described and available for everybody. So it obviously I've glossed over all the details uh that went into
45:33 the years of developing this system but it is a challenge. Uh the challenge has now been fully tested. The ground stations are certified ready for launch and ready to start processing the science data. And this Charlie, if you don't mind if I um add on to that. Um the sheer volume of data that NSAR is collecting is actually pushed at NASA into our manager data in the cloud. And so, um, given the sheer volume of data that I described earlier on, um, we there was actually not enough data bandwidth between Southern California and Alaska at the time that we were looking at this to actually process the data and move it up to Alaska where we actually have our
46:18 archive. And so, the the solution that made the most sense was actually moving into the cloud. And since that, we have moved everything into the cloud. And what's wonderful with that is now we could actually start developing tools where the tools reside next to the data and anyone from around the world. You could pick up your favorite phone, iPhone, iPad, Galaxy, what have you and be able to go in and actually process data where you are and when you want to because of these data challenges that we have. These are some of the wonderful benefits that's come out of the challenges that we faced with NICAR. So, Phil described how much data that's being downloaded that once we process it turns up to about 85 terabytes of data
47:04 um per day and pabytes of data every year. So, it's a huge data piece and we've actually come up with a solution that is actually pretty seamless between what Phil described down linking the data at all these new sites and having it all accessible to anyone and everyone around the world. All right, I'm going to go to another question here from YouTube. A couple people have asked, "Are there any plans for more joint missions between ISRO and NASA?" Karen, do you want to answer that? Yeah. So, so we don't at the moment have any uh you know have future plans. We
47:50 have been so focused on getting NISAR uh completed and into orbit um and and beginning to extract the the incredible science and applications out of the mission. Um so we don't have uh another another mission lined up at the moment. Um but uh I I assume we'll start talking about uh common interests on next missions at some point in the near future. Okay, and we'll make this our last question today. Uh, Large Mal on YouTube asks, "I get the idea behind radar, but can synthetic aperture radar be explained for a lay person?"
48:36 Bill, is that something you might be able to take? What was the question again? Or well, any of you. Um, is there a a simple way to explain synthetic aperture radar? Aperture radar. I can try and perhaps general can compliment. Uh yes. So uh a synthetic aperture radar the word synthetic means that we are essentially uh working as if the radar is working as if we have a very very large antenna in space. Of course we cannot large send in space a very large antenna um several kilometers away. We would like to have several kilometers large antenna we would like to have in space. We cannot have we cannot launch it. And so what we do uh we send out pulses and then we
49:22 combine these pulses from different locations as the radar flies along its orbit. Uh so it's essentially u just like faking it in a way um uh by just looking a uh the earth from different angular positions as the satellites flies along its orbit. So just to say in a very simple word we're uh sort of leveraging the fact that the satellites moves and as it moves it creates artificially a very long antenna um and that is basically what gives you a very fine resolution in space but of course the physical antenna is much smaller. Yeah, that was the point I was going to amplify. This is Karen that um the thing that we're really going after is very
50:08 high spatial resolution on the ground. And one of the basic laws of physics is to sample a very small area on the ground, you need a very large antenna. And of course, we're trying to get to centimeter scale change at at what 10 what do we say? 10 foot 10 foot resolution. We would need as Marco said earlier a miles large antenna to do that in a traditional way. So yeah, as Marco said, instead of having one big antenna, we essentially take a small antenna and move it and through processing, we simulate what we would get or we uh
50:54 we through through data processing analysis, we can recreate what we would have seen with that miles long antenna. Does that help? Um, I'm gonna add on here, but I'm gonna go a completely different way. Of course you are. Of course. Um, most people are used to looking at the ground. I'll say just like it's a photograph. So, these are LANCATs. Effectively, you take your favorite smartphone, you put it in space, you take a picture, and you've got an image of what's what's on the ground. And so, that's what most people are used to. With radar, your your camera actually has a flash. So, it's completely dark. You send out a flash, you illuminate the ground. And if that flash keeps on going
51:41 off enough as you're moving around the Earth, you're able to start seeing the Earth come together. Um, one of the things that's unique about radar is, um, if you think of, um, I'll say a policeman or a police woman that actually has a radar gun, they shoot, what they do is they're actually pointing a radar gun at a car and um, the radar signal goes from the radar gun out to the car and comes back. Well, actually does that. And then the car moves a little bit further and it sends another pulse out and another pulse out. We are able to with the radar measure how fast that car is moving for what we're using with synthetic aperture radar. Instead of having the car move and the um uh radar fix, we're actually
52:28 looking at the ground that's saying the same and the radar is moving in space. So we are able to actually measure very small changes. We're talking millimeter scale changes of the Earth's surface using the same type of technology that the police use in their radar gun, but we've got to mount it in the satellite. And the fact that we're doing sending out all these pulses kind of like the flash bulb that I was just talking about with the camera, you're able to create these images and the fact that we have this large antenna. That's one of the beautiful things with NIAR. Why do astronomers want bigger telescopes? Bigger telescopes collect more data. And so Nazar has the largest radar reflector ever lumped into orbit. And it's because when our radar pulses leave the satellite goes down to the ground, comes
53:15 back in, we're collecting more data that's ever been collected from a single radar pulse. We're able to focus it and see things more sensitive on the ground than we've ever been able to do in the past. That's been some of the magic of NISAR. And we'll be able to do science and applications that we've not been able to do because we have this incredible radar. It's using these advanced techniques like sweepar, this large radar dish. We've got all these different down link stations and we have a complete support network working with India, working with all of our other um agencies to actually bring this stuff to you. So, we're looking forward to what NISAR is going to be able to go ahead and provide to the community supporting the science, the application, and I don't know how many unknown users are on the phone right now. I'm hoping that
54:01 people will be expire inspired to take a look at my data. Go up to the Alaska satellite facility, ASF, download some data. Once launches, you're going to see things that you never knew were there. Go NAR. All right. Thanks to everyone for answering that question. Uh thank you again to all the panelists and those of you uh who are on the line and on YouTube. We hope you'll all join us for the NISAR launch coverage on Wednesday. Mission commentary will begin at 7:00 a.m. Eastern, 4:00 a.m. Pacific time. Our broadcast will originate from here at JPL and we will switch to the ISRO live feed at around 7:40 a.m. Eastern and we will remain with them all the way through launch. launch, I misspoke
54:46 earlier. Launch will actually be at 8:10 a.m. Eastern time, 5:10 a.m. Pacific, and uh if you are in India, that launch time is 5:40 p.m. You'll be able to watch the launch commentary on NASA Plus and also the NASA flagship YouTube channel. That's youtube.com/nasa. Uh, for more information on the mission, please narr I'm sorry, nasa.govnisar. You can also follow along on social media on the NASA JPL uh social channels, NASA Earth and at NASA. And you can find the the NISAR launch press kit, which is loaded with great information at
55:32 go.nasa.gov/nisarpresskit. uh for media and others who are looking for the source images and videos that we showed during this teleconference. You'll find links to those in the in the uh YouTube NASA JPL YouTube uh channel where we have live streamed this briefing. They will be in that description. Thank you again everyone for joining us and go nicer.
