Richa Sharma By

NEW DELHI: To increase industry participation in the Indian space programme, the Centre has set up two high-power steering committees to step up production capacity with industries.

The committees in the areas of launch vehicle and satellite production have been constituted by the Department of Space in order to evolve a comprehensive strategy to step up production by partnering with industries.

The committees shall consolidate the requirements for ongoing and future missions and also based on emerging opportunities for space markets and establish the production profile for satellites and launch vehicles.

ISRO’s commercial arm Antrix Corp provides space products and technical consultancy services to Indian and international customers worldwide.

“It will also access gap area in meeting production needs and to work out broad plans to realise their critical inputs and also recommend appropriate structural changes, policy guidelines, procedures skill set needs and human resource plans,” said a Parliamentary Standing Committee report on Science and Technology and Environment.

The committee headed by Congress MP Ashwani Kumar has recommended to the government to explore the participation of industry in country’s space programme. It hoped that the two committees would effectively works towards achieving the mandates assigned to them.

The constituted committees shall also create a strategy map for production with criteria for selection of prime contractors, industry linkages, technology sharing methods, IPR issues, joint ventures, infrastructure build-up, investment plan, quality assurance support, cost effectiveness, risk mitigation and other related issues.

Identifying critical technologies and collaborations towards selective self reliance and an implementation plan for ensuring fulfillment of the objectives defined with effective review mechanism are other areas assigned to committee.

Participation of industry in space programmes is limited.

NASA Invites India to Jointly Explore Mars

New Delhi: In future, India and the US could jointly explore Mars and who knows an Indian astronaut could also head to the Red planet on a joint mission. India’s maiden mission to the Red Planet, Mangalyaan, has opened the eyes of the world on ISRO’s capabilities at undertaking low cost, high value inter-planetary mission. When asked if India and America would launch a joint robotic mission to explore Mars, Charles Elachi, director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or JPL, a part of NASA and an institution better known for piloting most of the American planetary exploration efforts with rovers like Curiosity, said, “We hope so that it will be the case in the future. At NASA, we are just beginning to plan for next mission to Mars for the next decade, which is 2020-2030. In fact shortly, there is a meeting in Washington on possible collaborations for the next 5-6 mission to Mars and ISRO is invited for that meeting.”