NISAR: NASA and ISRO Collaboration on Mars Exploration

This stunning view of Mars from India's Mangalyaan spacecraft was released on Sept. 29, 2014, less than a week after the orbiter arrived at the planet.

Credit: ISRO

India's recent Mars success appears to have turned some heads.

NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will investigate ways to collaborate on future missions to Mars, officials said Tuesday (Sept. 30).

The announcement comes just one week after India put its first-ever Mars probe in orbit around the Red Planet, becoming just the fourth entity, after the United States, the Soviet Union and the European Space Agency, to do so.

NASA and ISRO also signed an agreement Tuesday that lays out their respective roles on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, which is scheduled to launch to Earth orbit in 2020 to study the consequences of climate change on a fine scale.

"The signing of these two documents reflects the strong commitment NASA and ISRO have to advancing science and improving life on Earth," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "This partnership will yield tangible benefits to both our countries and the world."



Bolden and ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan signed the two agreements Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Toronto.

The Mars document sets up a NASA-ISRO Mars working group, which will meet once a year to identify and plan out joint activities, which could at some point include a cooperative mission to the Red Planet, NASA officials said.

An artist's concept of the planned NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), satellite in orbit, showing the large deployable mesh antenna, solar panels and radar electronics attached to the spacecraft. 

The mission is a partnership between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Also up for discussion, they added, will be possible ways to coordinate the science activities of India's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) probe and NASA's MAVEN spacecraft (short for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), which arrived at the Red Planet on Sept. 21, just a week before MOM did.

The NISAR mission will employ two different radar frequencies, known as L-band and S-band, to measure and study small surface changes around the globe, officials said.

The new agreement specifies that NASA will provide NISAR's L-band system, a data-communication subsystem and some other gear; ISRO will be responsible for the body of the spacecraft, the S-band system, the rocket and launch services, NASA officials said.

NASA and ISRO have a history of working together. Under an agreement signed in 2008, for example, NASA provided two science payloads for India's Chandrayaan-1 moon mission, which spotted signs of water ice near the lunar north pole after launching in 2008.