Planned Deployment of the NISAR Engineering Payload Mission Testbed

Abstract

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission is a joint project between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Indian Space Research Organisation. Once deployed, NISAR will be an Earth-orbiting dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observatory, which will study hazards and global environmental change. NASA will provide the mission's Engineering Payload (EP) and the L-band synthetic aperture radar (L-SAR). ISRO will provide the spacecraft bus, the S-band SAR, the launch vehicle, and associated launch services for a 2022 launch. The mission will be operated jointly. This paper describes the planned deployment of the supporting NISAR Mission Testbed (MTB) for the NASA JPL-provided EP. Specifically, this paper provides an overview of the MTB facility composition, capabilities, and known limitations; MTB team responsibilities; plans for MTB integration, checkout, and validation for certification; and the planned uses of the MTB. The planned uses of the MTB support the overarching goals of discovering any problems at the earliest possible time and to offload the System Integration and Testing (SIT) campaign for the flight hardware and software schedule relative to some of the system-level testing. Hence, selected specific testing applications include early system design and functional verification, interface verification, system-level software integration and testing, and mission system prototyping for risk mitigation.