NASA ready to work with ISRO to help India build space station

New Delhi: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) chief Bill Nelson on Tuesday said the joint Indo-USA NISER satellite would be “one of the great observatories” to look at the changes happening on the Earth, besides noting that the USA was willing to collaborate with India on building an Indian Space Station.

Nelson, who will be in Bengaluru on Wednesday said he would not only be interacting with the ISRO officials but also meet the lone Indian astronomer Rakesh Sharma, whom the NASA Administrator – himself an astronomer - met for the first time in April 1991.

“Rakesh and I hit off immediately. We have not met after that, but we spoke over the phone,” he recalled at a media interaction here.

Nelson met Union Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh to take forward the discussions on space cooperation as outlined by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Joe Biden in their joint statement earlier this year.

NASA and ISRO have formed a joint working group on the human space flight programme. The two countries are also exploring cooperation in radiation impact studies, micro meteorite and orbital debris shield studies.

There are also discussions with prominent US industries like Boeing, Blue Origin and Voyager on specific items of cooperation and also to explore joint collaborations with Indian commercial entities, says a government official.

Asked whether the US will collaborate with India on the ‘Bharatiya Antariksha Station’ (Indian Space Station) project, Nelson said the US would be ready to collaborate with India in building the space station if it so desires.

NASA plans to deorbit the International Space Station by 2031 and take the space observatory to a graveyard in the southern Pacific.

"We expect to have a commercial space station by that time. I think India wants to have a space station. If India wants us to collaborate with them, of course, we will be available. But that's up to India," said Nelson, who was an astronaut and flew with the crew of the 24th Space Shuttle flight onboard ‘Columbia’ in 1986.

Last month Prime Minister Modi asked ISRO to establish a ‘Bharatiya Antariksha Station’ (Indian Space Station) by 2035 and send the first Indian to the Moon five years later.

Nelson said the USA would help train an Indian astronaut for a trip to the International Space Station in late 2024, but the astronaut will be selected by the ISRO.

On the NISER satellite that will be launched in the first quarter of 2024, the NASA chief said it would be one of the great observatories and four-five such observatories in combination with 25 other spacecraft looking at the earth would be able to determine what is happening on the earth’s surface and with the climate.

Costing $ 1.5 billion, the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISER) is one of the most expensive payloads in space research, which was conceptualised more than 15 years ago when New Delhi and Washington decided to enter into a strategic partnership following the historic nuclear deal.