“This event is exceptionally well timed, given the ongoing development in Indian space policy, US-India bilateral relationship and the region”, said Chirag Parikh, Deputy Assistant to the President and Executive Secretary National Space, US while opening the plenary session of Indo-Pacific GeoINT.
Parikh’s career evolved around geospatial data, where he worked as an analyst using geospatial imagery to run space policy under the Obama Administration leading the efforts for increased, improved and resilient geospatial space capabilities.
In his talk, he shed light on the changes in the global context for geospatial data, U.S policy and how both of these factors relate to US cooperation with India and the Indo-Pacific region.
He said, “The geospatial market is changing and diversifying rapidly and long gone are the days where a user of geospatial data could easily take into account all the data being captured by geospatial satellites and other geospatial and locational sources.”
“In addition to long-standing phenomenologies in the visual Spectrum we now have geospatial capabilities that are in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum from synthetic aperture radar to radio frequency data to hyperspectral and infrared and a huge quantity of non-imagery-based geospatial data as well.”
Geospatial system for solving Earth’s problem
He quoted, Vice President Kamala Harris saying “connect the high-tech to the low-tech so that these geospatial systems can be fully leveraged to help solve problems here on Earth, whether it’s addressing the climate crisis, supporting agricultural production, promoting City Planning and infrastructure development responding to natural disasters and of course enhancing our national security.”
He emphasized on Russia-Ukraine War, “On national security we’ve seen the value of commercial geospatial data play out in the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, where we’ve seen verifiable evidence of military buildup, military operations and damage and atrocities. Now as the Civil Commercial and National Security space sectors increasingly overlap, it’s incumbent that we have effective policies and enabling resources to fully take advantage of both the opportunity and growth of geospatial data.”
Space Policies and Objectives
US Space policy is guided primarily by the President’s 2021 space priorities, framework; and the policy highlights the need to maintain a vibrant space enterprise across all sectors and foster the policy and Regulatory environment that enables a competitive and burgeoning U.S. commercial space sector.
Parikh adds, “If space activities evolve the Norms, the rules and the principles that guide outer space activities must also evolve. Irresponsible activities in space government commercial or otherwise can have a downstream effect on all space operations from humans on the ISS to security to economic and societal needs that rely upon Space Systems. This is why we’ve placed such an emphasis in this Administration on the Artemis Accords whose membership continues to expand more and more Nations continue to see that this non-legally binding commitment is in the best interest of not only their own Nations but also the long-term sustainability of peaceful exploration of outer space.”
“We hope Nations continue to align themselves to a set of non-controversial principles. Space sustainability is incumbent to how we can ensure continued benefits from geospatial systems in through and from space. This goes from mitigating debris generation to properly deorbiting satellites to cleaning up the space environment.
Indo-US cooperation
Geospatial Data is a leading component of the U.S-India space Cooperative efforts, the area in which both the US and India are both world-class leaders. Commercially, the annual bilateral trade and geospatial services is estimated at over $1billion, which continues to grow rapidly. On the civil side India has hosted International Ground Stations for landsat.
He also mentioned about Israel preparing to launch the state-of-the-art NASA-ISRO SAR Mission, NISAR, which will be the first radar Imaging satellite to use dual frequencies.
On the security side, we previously signed a Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) for geospatial cooperation. Our respective policies on geospatial data are also coming closer into alignment. India’s New National Space policy notes the importance of enabling open data access from ISRO’s remote sensing satellites while laying out a clear data policy related to ground sampling distance. This dovetails with U.S policy efforts as well as with the White House has announced as the 2023 being the year of open science to promote open data and open science policies across our government and around the world.
While geospatial data is a leading element of our current bilateral space cooperation the U.S-India partnership already goes far beyond geospatial to a range of other activities including space exploration. The U.S-India initiative on critical and emerging technologies, that met earlier this year as well as the advanced domains defense dialogue that met just last month in Delhi.
“We are deepening our bilateral cooperation in new areas such as human spaceflight, while expanding our commercial space cooperation to new areas thanks in large part to the changes caught in India’s New National Space policy. Space data will continues to provide strong support to other initiatives within the QUAD including the climate working group and the indo-pacific partnership from Maritime domain awareness,” says Parikh in conclusion.
