Indicating that the French would continue to focus on high technology partnership with India, French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault began his four-day India tour by spending an afternoon at the ISRO headquarters in Bangalore.
The minister spent almost the entire Monday afternoon at ISRO, where chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar signed a partneship deal in satellite launch technology with French Space Agency (CNES) president Jean-Yves Le Gall. Kumar then took the minister on a guided tour of the ISRO's Telemetry Tracking and Command Network. It is from this centre, one of the newest in the world, that Indian space missions, including the two Indo-French satellites currently in orbit, are monitored. The Indo-French satellites are collecting data to track climate change.
Ayrault also met Rahul Narayan, CEO of leading Indian “NewSpace” start-up, Axiom Research Labs. This start-up put forward TeamIndus, the only Indian team competing for the Google Lunar XPrize, a global competition for engineers and entrepreneurs to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The first private company that successfully lands a module on the moon, places a robot that explores at least 500 meters and transmits high-definition video and images back to earth will receive $ 20 million. As TeamIndus is racing to design an all-terrain rover by end-2017 for this lunar mission, the CNES will provide it with cameras. France claims to be the global leader in the micro-camera technology.
French diplomats in Delhi recalled that sapce cooperation between India and France is more than half a century old. The two countries celebrated the 50th year of space cooperation in 2014.
