TRISHNA satellite is in advanced stage of implementation, says ISRO official
A computer-aided design (CAD) view of the TRISHNA satellite. | Photo credit: The Hindu
The Indo-French TRISHNA (Thermal Infra-Red Imaging Satellite for High-Resolution Natural Resource Assessment) satellite will be launched in the next 12-16 months, Jasvinder Singh Khoral, Director (Projects), UR Rao Satellite Center (URSC), said on Sunday (Oct 120261).
He said that this is the third satellite that India and France are developing after Megha-Tropiques and SARAL (the satellite with ARGOS and ALTIKA).
“This particular project has been around for a decade in its conceptualization and formalization. It has now entered the implementation phase. It is at the point where we will have a launch date in the next 12 to 16 months,” Mr Khoral said while speaking at the TRISHNA Water for Tomorrow workshop.
“We at URSC will be responsible for the realization of the bus along with the cargo, our partners at CNES (the French space agency) will deliver the other half of the cargo and I understand that the data will be processed jointly in both France and India,” he added.
Nagalakshmi AM, Project Director, TRINSHA, said that the main objective of the mission is better management of water resources, visible shortwave and thermal infrared observation of the Earth.
“We will have an open data policy, where scientific data will be distributed seamlessly around the world,” she said.
The TRISHNA mission, a joint effort between ISRO and CNES, will be launched by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.
ISRO and CNES are jointly developing TRISHNA, which is designed to provide high spatial and high temporal resolution monitoring of land surface temperature, emissivity and biophysical and radiation variables for regional to global scale surface energy budgeting.
The satellite will have two primary payloads, a thermal infrared (TIR) payload, developed by CNES, and a visible near infrared shortwave infrared (VNIR-SWIR) payload, developed by ISRO.
Published – 11 October 2026 21:25 IST