The NASA-ISRO Satellite Aperture RADAR (NISAR) mission is an Earth observation satellite jointly built by the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) at NASA and ISRO, India. The mission would enable detailed observation of earth’s land and ice mass at an unprecedented scale and precision.

The satellite, set to launch in early 2024, is at ISRO’s Satellite Integration and Test Establishment at Bengaluru, where it just passed a key test.

Starting in 2006, North Korea has made a series of nuclear tests in its hidden backyard. The country’s latest one was conducted in 2017 at Punggye-ri, some 3.6 kilometres northwest of its first nuclear test site. Despite its success, the test results provided loose estimates of the source parameters like the energy produced and the depth of the explosion. Since this was the most extensive test conducted by North Korea, it has evoked special attention among the scientific community in the last two years. While many studies have tried to reckon these parameters, the results were shrouded in uncertainty. Besides, the country’s political abnegation of seismometers called for an exigent need for a more accurate means of estimating the blast site’s characteristics. In a recent study, published in the Geophysical International Journal, a team of scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) seems to have done just that.