8/3/2019 India's Achievements in Space
1/2
India has come a long way in developing a multi-faceted and
multi-dimensional spaceprogramme - which is indigenous,
self-reliant and applications driven. India now builds its own
state of the art satellites - Indian National Satellite system
(INSAT) supporting nationalcommunications and broadcasting needs
and Indian Remote Sensing System (IRS) - supporting
national natural resources management, disaster management and
environmental monitoring.
India also has its own launch vehicles - Polar Satellite Launch
Vehicle (PSLV) and Geo-synchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV).
Indian space products - transponders, remotesensing data etc have
already become a part of global network.
The United States has a long history in space exploration and
has achieved many successes. The
US achievements in space exploration, landing man on moon, probe
on mars, manned missionwith space shuttle etc., are remarkable. The
intricate knowledge of space and earth that has been
made possible by US space systems is fascinating. The US space
industry is the world's largestspace industrial capability that is
driving its national and many other nation's space systems. The
President of US - George W Bush recently unveiled a new vision
of space for US with a strategyto explore the planetary system
including manned mission to Moon, Mars and farther beyond.
Indo-US Cooperation in Space
The beginning of Indian space activities was through an
International cooperation in which US
also have played a major role for establishment of the Thumba
Equatorial Rocket LaunchingStation (TERLS) - from where the first
sounding rocket, the US Nike-Apache was launched on
November 21, 1963 to conduct ionospheric experiment over the
earth's magnetic equator.
India conducted the world's largest sociological experiment, in
the mid-1970s, using spacetechnology through the Satellite
Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) for which NASA
provided its Application Technology (communications) Satellite
(ATS-6) over the Indian Ocean.This enabled the direct broadcast of
educational programmes on agriculture, family planning,
health and hygiene, etc to TV sets in about 2400 villages across
six states of India. Thisexperiment was the precursor to the
establishment of the multipurpose INSAT system in the
1980s. At that time, India procured all the four satellites
under the INSAT-1 series from a UScompany and three of them
INSAT-1A, INSAT-1B, INSAT-1D were even launched by US
launch vehicles.
Anuradha, an Indian cosmic ray payload, was flown aboard the US
Space Shuttle Challenger in1985 with the objective of determining
the composition and intensity of energetic ions from the
sun and other galactic sources.
In 70s, India established the data reception station for
receiving data from NASA's EarthResources Technology Satellite
(ERTS), later renamed as LANDSAT. A number of joint
experiment projects in remote sensing were undertaken using the
LANDSAT data and all theseexperiments fed to the design and
development of India's IRS system - data from which is now
globally marketed by a US company under a commercial arrangement
with India.
Even as late as 1997, the Department of Space (DOS) and the
Department of Science andTechnology (DST) on the Indian side and
the NASA and NOAA on the US side signed a
