By Ajey Lele and Munish Sharma
On Sep 24, soon after the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) of Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was placed in the orbit of Mars, the tweeter handler of Curiosity Rover of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), @MarsCuriosity greeted: “Namaste, @MarsOrbiter! Congratulations to @ISRO and India’s first interplanetary mission upon achieving Mars orbit.”
With the success of MOM, India has entered the ‘ivy league’ of space-faring nations capable of executing such technologically challenging space missions to other planets. Such missions are commonly known as deep space mission because they travel millions of kilometre distance in the outer space. Just two days before the entry of MOM in the Martian orbit another spacecraft of the United States called Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission or MAVEN has also stabilized itself in the vicinity of the Mars. It is expected that the data generated by both MAVEN and MOM would be shared by both the states to undertake further research.
Following the reimbursable agreement between ISRO and NASA on spacecraft communications and navigation support for India’s Mars Orbiter Mission, the deep space navigation and tracking services support was provided by NASA, during the non-visible period of the Indian Deep Space Network, a network of large and powerful antennas and communication facilities.
Indo-US space collaboration has a long history and the present visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US offers a golden opportunity for both the countries to pave the way to take such collaboration to the next level. Ahead of this visit, the union cabinet gave nod for signing of six MoUs in sectors, including environment and space science.
The visit is significant in terms of fostering greater ties and taking forward the Indo-US relations from the bonhomie developed over the civil nuclear agreement in 2005-08. President Barack Obama and the then prime minister Manmohan Singh had agreed to scale up joint India-US space collaboration for the benefit of humanity. The leaders had pledged to build closer ties in space exploration and earth observation through a Joint Civil Space Working Group meeting, established in 2011.
India-U.S. Space Cooperation: The Synergies
The US is collaborating with India in the area of space since India decided to establish its space programme during 1960s. The first sounding rocket launched by India from Thumba (southern parts of India) in November 1963 carrying instruments for conducting ionospheric experiments, named Nike-Apache, was made in the US. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in the mid-1970s was conducted by India in collaboration with NASA, which involved deployment of Direct Reception TV sets in about 2,400 villages across six states of India to receive educational programmes, one of the world’s largest sociological experiments. Under the coveted Indian National Satellite (INSAT) System, all the four satellites of INSAT-1 series were built by a US-based firm to India’s specifications, with US launch vehicles used for three of the satellites for their placement in the orbit.
India was one of the first countries to establish a reception station for receiving data from NASA’s Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS), later renamed as LANDSAT, in the remote sensing domain. As a result, India gained vital experience in the reception, processing and application of data gathered from remote sensing satellites. Presently, the constellation of India’s remote sensing satellites is the largest in the world in the civilian domain, and the gathered data is being put in use for applications in resource management, including water, food and agriculture. This data has also been made available to other states in the world on commercial basis.
In recent times, Chandrayaan-I, India’s unmanned lunar mission, has been the pivot of Indo-US cooperation in space exploration. ISRO’s Moon mission had carried two payloads from NASA, a Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar to map ice deposits on the lunar surface and a Moon Mineralogy Mapper to assess mineral resources of the Moon. This has been executed under the framework of an agreement with NASA to carry out lunar exploration, signed in July 2008. Subsequently, scientists from both the nations succeeded towards making a path-breaking discovery about the presence of water on the Moon based on the data generated from this mission.
The civil space cooperation between India and the US has been shaped under the framework of the Joint Working Group on Civil Space, which was constituted as the follow-up to the US-India Conference on Space Science, Application, and Commerce held in Bangalore in June 2004. Since then, space cooperation has expanded to the areas of space science, earth observation, satellite navigation, natural hazards research, disaster management support and education.
India and the US have signed various agreements and formed joint working groups to crystallize data sharing and expert collaboration between the space agencies and academia. The agreement for active collaboration on the Global Precipitation Measurement project, led by the US and Japan, was signed in 2012 for Megha-Tropiques and OceanSat-2 satellites. It enables deriving the global precipitation data for research and applications using the joint ISRO-French Space Agency Megha-Tropiques satellite and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) constellation of satellites. The Megha-Tropiques satellite has applications in analysis of water cycle in the tropical region, pivotal to the research on climate change. Under the auspices of the agreement, the radio scatterometer of OceanSat-2 was extensively utilized during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 to determine ocean surface winds. The global scientific community had been using the wind products derived from ISRO’s OCEANSAT-2 Scatterometer for applications in research and operations till March 2014.
At the academic level, ISRO has signed cooperative instruments for Technical Assistance Agreement (TAA) with California Institute of Technology (Caltech) / Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to enable exchange of technical information on possible cooperation in the joint development of a dual frequency (L and S band) Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite for earth observation.
The fourth meeting of India-US Joint Working Group on Civil Space Cooperation (JWG-CSC) was concluded at Washington DC in March 2013. Both the sides agreed for cooperation to improve the use of earth observation data to promote sustainable development, carry forward the proposed cooperation in L and S-band SAR mission and to discuss on promoting compatibility and interoperability in satellite navigation systems. In addition, the working group has agreed to establish scholarship in Aerospace Engineering at the California Institute of Technology every year.
India is implementing a Global Positioning System Aided Geo Augmented Navigation System (GAGAN) for civil aviation purposes (to augment GPS signals over the India region), under a commercial agreement with Raytheon, a US-based firm. Efforts are underway to ensure compatibility between India’s seven-satellite constellation of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) and the US Global Positioning System (GPS).
Differences and Pragmatism
Following the Nuclear tests (1974 and 1998), the US imposed stringent sanctions on India in the strategic sphere, including space, bringing space research labs under the entity list. After several rounds of talks between then external affairs minister Jaswant Singh and US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, the communication between the two heads of the government was opened up in 2000, in the form of summit-level visits. Ever since, pragmatism has overshadowed the Indo-US relations. The widening window for exchange of trade and commerce has unleashed numerous opportunities.
The bilateral trade in goods has quadrupled in the last decade, while trade in services has grown by 600 percent during the same period. In the defence sector, procurement contracts worth over $10 billion have been signed. Enormous potential for future cooperation lies in healthcare, technology, defence, counter-terrorism, counter-proliferation, internet governance and cyber security while geopolitical developments in West Asia and Afghanistan demand prominent role of India in the region.
However, the impending issues need to be addressed at the respective forums. The instances of surveillance by the National Security Agency need immediate attention of the Indian government. The mistrust thus developed has to be defused for the relations to prosper. The Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues affect trade in goods and cooperation in the pharmaceutical sector. The stringent visa and immigration policies of the US impact the business of Indian IT companies in the US, from where the Indian IT companies draw majority of their clientele. The civil nuclear cooperation hit a roadblock with India’s Nuclear Liability Law, and the nuclear trade between India and the US has not moved in the anticipated trajectory, which needs swift resolution. Very recently, India’s veto at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for Trade Facilitation Agreement attracted criticism in the Western media.
Both the countries are looking forward to the bilateral expansion of cooperative activities in space. The common goals have been identified in the form of joint weather and climate forecasting projects to augment research in climate change, validating and utilizing data from land imaging satellite programmes, land surface monitoring and disaster mitigation and response. Also, there is a need to evolve joint mechanism for working on major collaborative projects like missions to the Moon and Mars. The potential for mutually beneficial cooperation are immense in the global commons: sea, outer space and cyberspace.
Particularly, it appears that owing to their apprehensions in the missile defence area the US is not keen to evolve a legally binding treaty mechanism in the space arena. Hence, there is need for both the states to have healthy debate on the issues related to space security.
(Ajey Lele, Research Fellow, IDSA, New Delhi and Munish Sharma, Research Scholar, Manipal University. Both can be contacted at southasiamonitor1@gmail.com)
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