On 26 April 2018, delegates from India’s space agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), visited Indonesia’s space agency LAPAN at its Satellite Centre in Bogor, West Java. The purpose of the visit was to discuss the possibility of LAPAN supporting India’s upcoming lunar mission Chandrayaan-2.
The visit was attended by Anoop Srivastava, Controller of ISRO’s Space Applications Centre (ISAC), V V Srinivasan, Directory of ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC), Subbiah Arunan, Director of Special Projects ISRO, Dr. D. Gowrisankar, ISRO’s Deputy Director for International Cooperation, Dr. Sudha Raman, Deputy Director of India’s National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS), T K Rajendran, Deputy General Manager ISTRAC, and Ajit Singh, from the Indian Embassy at Jakarta.
During the visit, the two parties discussed the possibility of using LAPAN’s full-motion S/X-band antenna, which was inaugurated only last month, to support the launch of Chandrayaan-2 in October/November 2018, amongst other unspecified areas of collaboration. As such, the ISRO delegation visited the Satellite Centre’s Assembly, Integration & Test (AIT) facility and Mission Control Centre.
ISRO and LAPAN have had a long history of collaboration, with ISRO owning a ground station on the Indonesian island of Biak, which has supported many of India’s launches. India has also launched all of LAPAN’s indigenous small satellites, the Lapan-A1, -A2, and –A3.
