National space agency ISRO and French space agency CNES signed an agreement to set up a joint maritime surveillance system in the country in May. K.Sivan, Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, and Jean-Yves Le Gall, President of CNES of France, signed the agreement in Bengaluru. The two nations will explore putting up a constellation of low-Earth orbiting satellites that will identify and track the movement of ships globally, and in particular, those moving in the Indian Ocean region where France has its Reunion Islands. The CNES-ISRO agreement intends to supply an operational system for detecting, identifying and tracking ships in the Indian Ocean. It provides for a maritime surveillance centre to be set up in India in May this year; sharing of capacity to process existing satellite data and joint development of associated algorithms. 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.
