NASA is planning to spend $2.5 billion on five new spacecraft to monitor the changing climate. The first mission, to launch in January 2023, is a partnership with the Indian Space Research Organization drawing on two kinds of radar systems that can measure changes in the Earth’s surface at less than a half inch. The first mission is called NASA-ISRO synthetic aperture radar or NISAR and will measure ice-sheet collapse, earthquakes, volcanoes and landslides.
Inmarsat As an arctic nation, Canada has an interest in monitoring changes in the amount of ice in its navigable waters—with its own agency, the Canadian Ice Service, to keep track. The office draws on streams of data from multiple satellites—primarily the Canadian Space Agency’s RadarSat-2, but also NASA’s Landsat and ESA’s Sentinel system, according to Euroconsult. The ice service also buys data sets about 10 times a year for higher-resolution imagery, primarily from the Italian COSMO-Skymed and the German TerraSAR-X.