Two days ago, officials from the Aerospace Committee of Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Aerospace and Defense Industry, led Acting Deputy Chairman Malik Olzhabekov, arrived in Bangalore, where they met with ISRO leaders and took a tour of ISRO facilities in the area.
The meeting discussed the various areas within the field of outer space, in which ISRO and the Kazakh space agency, KazCosmos, could collaborate. These included space communications systems, launch vehicles and systems, space engineering components, Earth remote probing systems and small satellites.
In 2009, ISRO and KazCosmos signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), which was part of a series of important agreements signed between the two countries during the visit of Kazakhstan’s President, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Also, earlier this year, ISRO launched a Kazakh nano-satellite, Al-Farabi-1, aboard its PSLV-C37 rocket which set a record for launching 104 satellites at a time.
KazCosmos is a relatively new space agency, and was established in 2007. So far, Kazakhstan has put three communications satellites into orbit, Kazsat-1, Kazsat-2, and Kazsat-3.
