The Hindu Business Line : Italian Space Agency, ISRO to expand ties

The chiefs of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have also decided to expand the basket of co-operation in space sciences.

The President of ASI, Mr Giovanni Fabrizio Bignami, told Business Line that some of the areas identified for co-operation with ISRO were small satellites (EOS), networking ground stations for data reception from satellites and space experiments.

Expressing happiness with the performance of Agile, Italy’s small Gamma and X-ray satellite, which was launched by the ISRO’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) on April 23 this year, Mr Bignami said the next practical move for ASI was to put an instrument on board the Oceansat-2 of ISRO, expected to be launched in the Spring of 2008.

The instrument would carry out observations of the atmosphere and is expected to be delivered to the ISRO in October.

Agile is working very well. It has been put in a perfect orbit, the best possible we could get by the PSLV and is doing extremely well. It observes the deep sky, the ASI chief who is participating in the ongoing 58th International Astronautical Congress here said.

A leading player in the global space development, ASI recently launched in June the first of a constellation of 4 satellites called Cosmo-SkyMed in the low earth orbit in the X-band (microwave) radar, which can see more detail, even through cloud cover.

The data from the satellites would be available free for no-profit and non-military use. Indian scientists have already come up with some requests for scientific studies, especially in areas such as environment and disaster mitigation, he said.

“We have given the first set of data of the satellite to the ISRO Chairman, Dr Madhavan Nair, today and agreed to collaborate with India on EOS,” Mr Bignami said.

In ground stations which can receive imagery from these near earth satellites, Italy can offer its stations in Kenya and Italy to be networked with ISRO’s own, to receive data. For the launch of at least two of the remaining three satellites in 2008-2009, PSLV could also be a contender, he said.

On the planetary exploration programme of Italy, Mr Bignami said the focus is now on Mars. We are also collaborating with the NASA on the Mars mission as well as with the European Space Agency (ESA) in planetary exploration.

For Moon, which has excited many countries, he said Italy does not have any immediate programme. “We have just completed a mission to the Moon through Smart-I”, he added.

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