India will host earth station for US satellite data

Scientists and government policy makers of both countries are exploring the possibility of setting up an earth station in India for data sent from a set of American remote sensing satellites, an ISRO release said here.

The satellites form the US National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS).

A joint working group, to foster collaboration on various earth observation projects, was exploring the possibility of setting up the station, which will get data from the NPOESS, the release said.

The working group is also "investigating the comparability and complementarity of data from the US Landsat and the Indian IRS satellites," the release said.

These initiatives were among those discussed, when the working group met here earlier this week. Scientists and government officials from both countries revived official talks to improve civilian space co-operation between the two countries, as envisaged in an ice-breaking conference last year.

The June 2004 conference, though achieved little materially, was considered a significant step forward by both sides, after the US embargoed exports of important technologies to Indian "entities" like Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) following the Pokhran nuclear tests.

This week's meeting was the working group's first since that conference. It discussed co-operation in earth observation, satellite communication, satellite navigation and its application, space science, natural hazards research and disaster management support, and education and training in space. These topics were identified based on the vision document on strengthening Indo-US co-operation issued at the end of the June 2004 Bangalore conference, the release said.

P S Goel, a member of India's Space Commission and director of the ISRO Satellite Centre, and Anthony F Rock, a US principal deputy assistant secretary of state, co-chaired the meet, in which some 25 US delegates participated.

They came from the US department of state, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Transportation, Department of Commerce, US Geological Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, universities and industry.

The Indian side included representatives from the department of space, ministry of external affairs, and Antrix Corporation, ISRO's commercial arm.

The delegations said, significant progress has been made in promoting interoperability among existing and future space-based navigation systems.

This includes the US global positioning system, the US wide area augmentation system and India's Gagan, a space-based augmentation system. A US firm, Raytheon is supplying key components and services required to build Gagan (Geo-Aided Navigation).

Other such systems include the Galileo, built by the Europeans and Glonass, of the Russians.