India and France are working on their third joint satellite mission, even as the bilateral space collaboration is entering into multiple domains, including the human spaceflight program.
Context
India and France are working on their third joint satellite mission, even as the bilateral space collaboration is entering into multiple domains, including the human spaceflight program.
About the Joint missions between India and France
- France is the biggest partner of India in space.
- ISRO and French space agency Centre National d’ÉtudesSpatiales (CNES) has undertaken two joint missions:
- ‘Megha-Tropiques’, which was launched in 2011
- ‘SARAL-Altika’ in 2013
- The third mission is the earth observation satellite mission.
Megha-Tropiques
- Megha-Tropiques is a satellite mission to study the water cycle in the tropical atmosphere in the context of climate change.
- Megha-Tropiques was successfully deployed into orbit by a PSLV rocket in October 2011.
- Megha-Tropiques is designed to understand tropical meteorological and climatic processes.
SARAL-Altika
- SARAL or Satellite with ARgos and ALtiKa is a cooperative altimetry technology mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and CNES (Space Agency of France).
- SARAL performs altimetric measurements designed to study ocean circulation and sea surface elevation.
- The payload modules were provided by CNES: ALTIKA (altimeter), DORIS, Laser Retro-reflector Array (LRA), and ARGOS-3 (Advanced Research and Global Observation Satellite) data collection system.
- ISRO is responsible for the platform (Indian Mini Satellite-2 bus), launch (Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket), and operations of the spacecraft. SARAL was successfully launched into a Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).
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