In a first, Nasa and Isro will join forces to manufacture and launch an all-weather satellite to support a slew of operations as different as disaster management, understanding movement of tectonic plates to climate change and estimation of crop and tree cover. Isro chairman K. Radhakrishnan best summed up this combined effort, saying: “It is the turning point in Indo-US relations.” He added that the new satellite will be the precursor for joint space missions in future. “It’s a recognition of our ability to build and launch satellites,” he told this newspaper. An agreement to draw up the project report was signed on September 25, coinciding with the birth anniversary of the late chairman Prof. Satish Dhawan. Teams from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, and Isro’s Satellite Centre (ISAC), Bengaluru, will put the satellite together for launch onboard an Indian rocket in 2019-2020. He said on completion of the project report, the governments of both nations will decide on funding the satellite project which, according to back-of-the-envelop calculations, could be in excess of '1000 crores. “We have been talking to Nasa as part of the Indo-US civilian space cooperation agreement, and took the initiative forward during the recent visit of Administrator Charles Bolden to New Delhi and Ahmedabad. It’s not like putting together two instruments, but the entire satellite system,” he said adding that JPL has agreed to provide its ground station to monitor the orbiter to Mars for an undisclosed sum. This maiden Nasa-Isro collaboration could throw up a wide range of opportunities in exploration of outer space, inter-planetary missions, and production and launch of advanced communication and remote sensing satellites, ending an era of distrust and denial of technologies triggered first by Isro’s decision to turn to Russia for cryogenic engines and technology in early ‘90s and nuclear tests at Pokhran in 1998. The technology embargos marred relations between Nasa and Isro though the American space agency provided the first rocket, a Nike Apache, which marked the berth of the Indian space programme in 1963.
