Nair

Washington, Jan. 24: The star-crossed Indo-US nuclear deal will give way to joint efforts to reach the moon as the new symbol of friendship between New Delhi and Washington following the visit of G. Madhavan Nair, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), next week.

Nair will meet Michael Griffin, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa), and fine-tune America’s involvement in Chandrayaan-1, the first Indian planetary science and exploration mission.

Preparations are briskly apace at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, for the launch of India’s pioneering moon-bound lunar craft on April 9, but a final word on speculation about changing the lift-off to May or June will come after Nair’s meetings here.

His talks here are expected to pave the way for the establishment of an earth reception station in India to support worldwide timely environmental data collection.

The station will be set up in cooperation with the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is already working with India on monitoring of drought and malaria outbreaks and on aerosol control.

Announcements in these areas will follow Nair’s meetings with Navy Vice-Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, administrator of NOAA, which, among other things, monitors and issues crucial tsunami alerts.

Nair’s arrival in Washington on Tuesday will be triumphalist: it marks a full circle from the severe sanctions imposed on Isro following the Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 1998, under which even lowly Isro officials were denied visas to visit the US.

Earlier, the US led efforts to establish the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) in 1987 to cripple the missile programmes of countries like India and five years later tried to unsuccessfully persuade Russia to stop space cooperation with Isro.

Turning a new page, the Nasa administrator went to India last year and said he was “sorry about the US sanctions on some Isro units” while inviting Nair to visit America.

Nair is expected to use the trip to persuade Griffin to use his clout to withdraw some sanctions on Isro units, which continue to be in force.

Chandrayaan-1 will have two payloads — scientific instruments — from Nasa: a Mini Synthetic Aperture Radar to detect water in the permanently shadowed areas of the moon and a Moon Mineralogy Mapper to characterise and map minerals on the lunar surface.

The speeding up of Indo-US space cooperation represents a belated recognition that with the nuclear deal on life support, new, imaginative initiatives are needed to symbolise friendship between the two countries that until recently appeared excessively promising.

India’s first lunar probe will take more than five days to get to the moon. It will send data back to the earth while Chandrayaan-1 is in a 100km polar orbit around the moon for two years.

Nair will go to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and wind up his trip with a speech at the California Institute of Technology on Isro’s achievements and a visit to the Institute’s Jet Propulsion Centre, where America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, was created.