July 30 (UPI) -- NASA announced Wednesday it, in a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization, launched a radar system to map Earth as never before.
The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR, satellite blasted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre on the island of Sriharikota in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India at 8:10 a.m. EDT Wednesday.
NISAR, which NASA described in a press release as "a critical part of the United States-India civil-space cooperation," will orbit from 464 miles above Earth, and use a pair of radar instruments to monitor almost the planet's land and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days.
The NISAR mission is the first such undertaking between NASA and ISRO, in which the two agencies co-developed hardware for an Earth-observing mission.
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