While attending the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto, the two space agency leaders - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Administrator Charles Bolden and K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), met to discuss and sign a charter that establishes a NASA-ISRO Mars working group to investigate enhanced cooperation between the two countries in Mars exploration.
They signed two documents to launch a NASA-ISRO satellite mission to observe Earth and establish a pathway for future joint missions to explore Mars, and also signed an international agreement that defines how the two agencies will work together on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission, targeted to launch in 2020.
The joint NISAR Earth-observing mission will make global measurements of the causes and consequences of land surface changes, while the potential areas of research include ecosystem disturbances, ice sheet collapse and natural hazards.
By Ruchi Singh
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