India to carry first-ever French payload for Venus mission in 2025; all you need to know

On October 1, France announced that it will participate in India’s historic mission to Venus scheduled for the year 2025. This comes after President of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) K Sivan and the President of the French National Center for Space Studies (CNES) Jean-Yves Le Gall held a virtual meeting session and discussed topics related to the field of human space flight and agreed to boost France-India space cooperation. The two countries also held talks on the establishment of a ground facility in French Guiana. 

“The president of ISRO had a discussion with the president of CNES and they deliberated on various subjects such as common knowledge of the maritime domain, Trishna, ARGOS in Oceansat-3, cooperation in the field of manned space flights and establishing ground stations in Guyana, ” Indian Embassy in France wrote in an online post.

President Jean-Yves Le Gall had attended the international Human Spaceflight Symposium organized by the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), and the Astronautical Society of India (ASI) in Bangalore, India, on 24 January 2020. During his visit, he had announced bolstering of France and India’s cooperation for human spaceflights and India’s future Gaganyaan missions and had affirmed CNES’s support for the establishment of India’s space station. 

India and France also embarked on the development of its first space system in the world for the surveillance of maritime traffic in August last year. CNES and ISRO in collaboration started the manufacture of satellites with telecommunications (AIS automatic identification) and observation radar and optical instruments according to the Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES) release. France and India will jointly operate the satellites and will monitor maritime traffic in the Indian Ocean, while the space system will also be utilized for French economic interests.

According to the Asia Pacific space watch report, CNES and its industry partners have extensive experience as it has supplied flights to the International Space Station (ISS) at European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) for the long space missions such as the European Space Agency (ESA) six-month Proxima mission. 

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French payloads for India's space mission

India and France, therefore, have collaborated for the CNES and ISRO’s teams to finalize cooperative agreements to provide services at CADMOS, at MEDES in collaboration with ESA’s European Astronaut Centre (EAC) at Novespace. As per CNES’ release, the two nations would conduct training on parabolic flights onboard the Air Zero G. India and France jointly operate climate monitoring satellite TRISHNA, a high-precision thermal infrared observer which is expected to join the Indo-French satellite fleet. In 2019, Argos-4 Payload Module to be integrated into the Oceansat-3 satellite arrived in India from France. For India's Venus mission, the VIRAL instrument (Venus Infrared Atmospheric Gases Linker) will be co-developed with ROSCOSMOS and the LATMOS laboratory of CNRS with the French payloads for India's space mission in 2025. 

“Oceansat-3 is a central mission for the operational continuity of the Argos system. It will also strengthen the Franco-Indian fleet of satellites monitoring the climate from space,” the CNES revealed in the release. 

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