Plan to launch low orbiting satellites

• National space agency ISRO and its French counterpart The Centre national d'études spatiales (CNES) (English: National Centre for Space Studies) sealed an agreement to set up a joint maritime surveillance system in the country.
• The two nations will explore putting up a constellation of low-Earth orbiting satellites that will identify and track movement of ships globally – and in particular those moving in the Indian Ocean region where France has its Reunion Islands.
• Before that, they will initially share data from their present space systems and develop new algorithms to analyse them, according to the Paris based National Centre for Space Studies.
• The two agencies have put up two climate and ocean weather monitoring satellites Megha-Tropiques (of 2011) and SARAL-AltiKa (2013) that are considered a model.

The Hindu