The Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES) Board of Directors conducted a meeting on March 12, 2020, and gave the green light to France for the French-Indian Trishna program to pursue activities for the new Space Inspire series of flexible satellites, as well as the development of equipment for the spacecraft bus and shared payload.
The collaboration has been thought of way back in 2018 but did not materialize or rather is taking its time to materialize. The French President Macron was particularly keen on strengthening this bond between France and India. Now that Trishna has been given the get-go signal, it will be extremely beneficial to ISRO also.
Trishna is a mission to deliver thermal-infrared imagery of Earth’s surface at high spatial and temporal resolution. This comes at a crucial point in climate change to keep better track of the water cycle and to better manage the plate’s limited water resources. In 2018, the French president Emmanuel Macron’s visit had solidified the France-India bond over Trishna which was given the top-priority at CNES’s Science Survey Seminar last year in Le Havre.
Space Inspire is the new series of ‘flexsats’ developed by Thales Alenia Space to meet the future challenges of satellite telecommunications. CNES is a part of this plethora of new satellites, and the meeting decided the fate of CNES to engage in activities that will benefit the society, further extending its industrial uses.
After this 362nd session, CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall commented: “Today’s Board of Directors meeting took decisions that will be critical to our future activities, giving us the go-ahead to engage two new programs with great potential. Besides being especially innovative, Trishna, developed with Airbus Defence & Space, and Space Inspire, developed with Thales Alenia Space, will allow CNES to exploit synergies in numerous fields for the greater benefit of our space program and industry.”
