NASA To Provide Advanced Training To Indian Astronauts

A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi completed his tour of the United States, a joint statement released welcomed the decision of NASA and ISRO to develop a strategic framework for human spaceflight cooperation by the end of 2023. NASA will provide advanced training to Indian astronauts at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, with a goal of mounting a joint effort to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2024.

The Indian astronauts will receive advanced training at NASA, as a part of the US-India initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET) which was launched in February this year.

The iCET includes various bilateral initiatives and under the collaboration in the space sector between both countries, to strengthen cooperation on the human spaceflight mission, including establishing exchanges that will include advanced training for an Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) or the Department of Space astronaut at NASA Johnson Space Center.

Additionally, under iCET, within next year, Indian aerospace companies and US Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) companies will work together for the advancement of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) project initiative, which is a program to contract transportation services to send small robotic landers and rovers to the Moon's south polar region for scouting for lunar resources, testing in situ resource utilization (ISRU) concepts, and performing lunar science to support the Artemis lunar program.

Recently, ISRO’s U.R. Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, India, got the delivery of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) Satellite and the satellite will be be launched from India next year.

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