960428

India-NASA to share

scientific information

in space technology

Washington: India and the National Aeronautic Space Administration ( NASA) , the U.S. space agency, plan to enter into an agreement for ex change and sharing of scientific information in space technology on which India has built its present ballistic missile systems.

D. Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan , chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization who was recently in United States, told reporters here that the agreement would be signed shortly. He said only the formalities are to be completed af ter which both sides would sign a memorandum of understanding and immediately begin ex changing and sharing data collected from each other's satellites. He said he achieved substantial progress in his talks with NASA Administrator Dan Golden and other senior officials.

The two sides have agreed to cooperate in exchanging data between the satellite systems owned and operated by the United states and Indian satellites , particularly India's INSAT and IRS ( Indian Remote Sensing) satellites.

The cooperation agreement with NASA would be for a long haul and would involve " scientific cooperation in measuring of weather modeling and climactic systems, " and also "cooperation in NASA's ambitious programme on the mission to plane t Earth , " Kasturrangan said. The accord would envisage the possibility of flying each other's sensors on board the other's satellite as part of complementing and supplementing the informa tion that the existing system can provide.

India will contribute to this endeavour in providing considerable data it has developed through its geospheric and biospheric programmes vis-a-vis the distribution of a plethora of gases and aerosols that permeate the different ozon e layers. The NASA on its part will also make available its own measurements in both the Unit ed States and elsewhere for these parameters thus enabling the Indian system to monito r global geospheric and biospheric activities. The U.S. space agency through its plan et Earth mission has been looking for cooperation on international scale. This envisa ges several scientific studies on the ecosystems and the sustaiinability of the ecosy stems.

Previous imports from the West for India's space programme , some clandestine, some overt, have nourished India's nuclear and rocket efforts. It built the medium range Agni missile by taking a first stage rocket from a small space launcher and combining it with guidance technology developed by the German space agency.

NASA 's cooperation dating back to 1960's was also crucial in its subsequent development of missile technology. In 1963 U.S. scientists from NASA launch ed the first small rocket from Indian soil - an American Nike Apache. " We were waiti ng for the payload to arrive when we saw a guy on a bicycle coming up an unpaved road, " one NASA veteran of the launch recently recalled . " He had the payload in the basket."

One of India's best known scientists, A.P.J. Abul Kalam was trained in the United States and visited the space centres where the U.S. scout rocket was conceived . He returned home to build India's first space rocket, the SLV-3, a carbon copy of the Scout . France supplied the next technology infusion for the Viking high-thrist liquid rocket motor used on the European Space Agency's Ariane satellite launch.

Kasturirangan has also disclosed that an agreement similar to the one to be signed with NASA is planned with another U.S. agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and that he had met with NOAA's administrator , Jim Baker, in t his regard. The question of whether India would enter the market of commercially launching the satellites of other countries as China is doing , is still unsettled. But Indians claim they have received a few inquiries.

Kasturirangan's trip to the United States reportedly also involved discussions with the American company EOSAT , a joint venture of Lockheed Mar tin and Hughes Aerospace, which is a partner with Antrix corporation, a company floate d by the Indian Department of Space. In February 1994, EOSAT signed an agreement with Antrix to exclusively receive and market Indian remote sensing satellite data on a global basis . EOSAT's ground station Norman , Oklahoma, received removed sensing data from India n satellites.-APP