NISAR — which stands for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar — will use two radar instruments operating at different wavelengths, one built by NASA and one by ISRO, to map Earth’s changing ice and land surfaces. Globally, the satellite will be able to identify changes in soil moisture, forest biomass and glaciers, among other things.

A formidable new radar satellite jointly developed by the United States and India launched Wednesday, designed to track subtle changes in Earth's land and ice surfaces and help predict both natural and human-caused hazards.

The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, or NISAR satellite, is the first such collaboration between the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and U.S. space agency NASA. It took off from India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre at 1210 GMT or 1740 local time atop a medium-lift rocket,