blog post #6

During our final trip to NASA I found it very interesting to hear how they will be handling the NISAR missions data. The NISAR mission is a collaborative project between the Indian space agency and NASA which is similar to how other missions and satellite launches are produced. The data for these collaborative missions is collected and shared with the world. This is different from the normal process where the data is collected, but not released to the entire public only to scientists and organizations that have been approved. Up until now the United States has been using Europe’s Sentinel 1A an 1B satellites as a part of an agreement to share the data that is collected. The NISAR satellite will be NASA’s version of the Sentinel 1A an 1B satellites. It will have a stronger radar than those two satellites and will also be able to capture two full images of the earth every 12 days. I found it very interesting to hear about how political the release of collected data is. In India for example they typically do not just release all of the data they collect to the public. This is problematic because NASA is required to release the data so the Indian space agency will have  to adjust their policies for this collaborative mission. With our current political administration I think it is of the utmost importance that all this data collected about our world thanks to NISAR be released to the public. The 20 terabytes a day that NISAR will be collecting is going to greatly improve our knowledge of the earth and how it is changing. This data will be put to use in the political arena, farming, drought prevention, subsidence, and any other way that could be helpful to the environment. All of this data does pose a bit of a problem to me. For instance what if a country doesn’t want us looking at everything they are doing. How does the jurisdiction fall in this case scenario? Will NISAR also be used as a means of espionage? 


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