ESA and Indian space agency ISRO agree on future cooperation

Over decades, national and international space agencies have built up vast banks of knowledge and experience exploring our Solar System. Through sharing resources – physical infrastructure on the ground, lessons from past successes and failures, and ideas for the future – we reach further, bringing home more from space, for less.

ESA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have signed a cross-support arrangement for the exchange of support and expertise that will ensure both agencies can get information to and from their spacecraft when they need to most – especially during mission-critical moments like the hours after launch or during a landing.

ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, ISRO Chairman Kailasavadivoo Sivan and senior officials from the two agencies met virtually on 30 July to celebrate the signing of the arrangement and to discuss the future of spaceflight collaboration between ESA and ISRO.

Boosting efficiency and science, reducing risks and costs

Spacecraft operators build deep space tracking stations to exchange data with their spacecraft, sending up commands from Earth to control the craft and its instruments and receiving valuable scientific and spacecraft status data from space.

But sometimes, an operator needs to track or command their spacecraft when it is outside the field of view of their own antennas or when their own stations are at maximum capacity ’speaking to’ other missions.

During critical moments, it is also important to have a backup antenna for communicating with a spacecraft in case of an emergency at the main tracking station – anything from a computer glitch to a nearby earthquake.

Building new giant antennas and tracking stations to meet these requirements for each mission would be very expensive. Receiving support from the stations of partner organisations instead significantly reduces costs, fosters international collaboration and allows both partners to exchange and benefit from each other’s mission experience and technical expertise.

Thanks to its global network of deep space tracking stations, ESA can help its partners track, command and receive data from spacecraft almost anywhere in the Solar System via its ESOC Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

Under the new cross-support arrangement, ESA tracking support could be provided for upcoming ISRO missions such as those of India’s first human spaceflight programme, Gaganyaan, the Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander and the Aditya-L1 solar research mission. In return, future ESA missions will receive similar support from ISRO’s own tracking stations.