The French-Indian satellite Megha-Tropiques

Megha Tropiques (Megha means cloud and Tropiques is tropics in French) is the new satellite that is a joint project between India and France. Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) have collaborated on the project.

It will help to study the water cycle in the tropics with respect to climate change. The exchange of energy between oceans and atmosphere effect the climate but the data and understanding of related processes is limited. Megha Tropiques can help in building up prediction models and can also help in better predictions of cyclones or droughts for example.

Scientific objectives of the project can be accesses from here

Its payload consists of:

1)      MADRAS: a microwave imager to study clouds,

2)      SAPHIR: a 6 channels microwave radiometer,

3)      SCARAB,

4)      GPS (ROS)

The launch is set for the second semester of 2011.

Reference and further information-

http://meghatropiques.ipsl.polytechnique.fr/

http://smsc.cnes.fr/MEGHAT/