The Indo-French satellite TRISHNA (Thermal Infra-Red Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural Resource Assessment) will be launched in the next 12-16 months, said Jasvinder Singh Khoral, Director (Projects), U.R. Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), on Sunday (October 11, 2026).

He said this was the third satellite that India and France are developing after Megha-Tropiques and SARAL (Satellite with ARGOS and ALTIKA) satellites.

“This particular project has been around for a decade or so in its conceptualisation and formalisation. Now it has come to the realisation stage. It is at a point where, in the next 12 -16 months, we will be due for launch,” Mr. Khoral said while speaking at the TRISHNA Water for Tomorrow workshop.

“We at the URSC will be responsible for the realisation of the bus along with the payloads our partners in CNES [France’s space agency] would be delivering the other half of the payloads and I understand the data will be processed jointly both in France and in India,” he added.

Nagalakshmi A.M., Project Director, TRINSHA, said the main objective of the mission is better management of water resources, visible shortwave and thermal infrared Earth observation.

“We will have an open data policy where science data is disseminated to the entire globe seamlessly,” she said.

The TRISHNA mission, a collaborative endeavor between ISRO and CNES, will be launched by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

ISRO and CNES are jointly developing TRISHNA, which is engineered to deliver high spatial and high temporal resolution monitoring of the earth’s surface temperature, emissivity, and biophysical and radiation variables for surface energy budgeting at regional to global scale.

The satellite will have two primary payloads, the Thermal Infra-Red (TIR) payload, developed by CNES, and the Visible-Near Infra-Red Short Wave Infra-Red (VNIR-SWIR) payload, developed by ISRO.

The French space agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) said that it is not perturbed with the back-to-back failures of Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO)’s workhorse rocket, the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), and has complete trust in its Indian partner.

The PSLV is scheduled to launch the Indo-French TRISHNA (Thermal Infra-Red Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural Resource Assessment) mission next year which is a collaborative endeavor between ISRO and CNES.

“There is always a risk with launches and we know the risks. You must trust your partners and trust is very important in space cooperation because we do difficult things together and to do difficult things you trust each other. ISRO is a huge space player in the world, they know what to do. So we trust them for the launch and the satellite also,” Lionel Suchet, Chief Operating Officer, CNES told The Hindu.

The PSLV had suffered two setbacks. On January 12, 2026, the PSLV-C62 mission carrying the EOS-N1 earth observation satellite failed to finish its intended trajectory after an anomaly was detected during the end of the third stage of the launch vehicle. On May 18, 2025, while ISRO attempted to launch the EOS-09 satellite aboard the PSLV-C61 mission, it couldn’t complete it. It was also due to an anomaly in the third stage of the rocket.

“Setbacks sometimes happen with vehicles and we are not responsible for the launch but we trust our Indian partners ISRO in particular to launch the mission with the vehicle (PSLV),” said Christophe Venet, Director of Europe and International Affairs, CNES.

ISRO and CNES are jointly developing TRISHNA which is engineered to deliver high spatial and high temporal resolution monitoring of earth’s surface temperature, emissivity, and biophysical and radiation variables for surface energy budgeting at regional to global scale.

According to ISRO, this mission addresses critical water and food security challenges, focusing on the impacts of human-induced climate change and efficient water resource management through evapotranspiration monitoring.

The satellite will have two primary payloads, the Thermal Infra-Red (TIR) payload, developed by CNES and the Visible – Near Infra-Red – Short Wave Infra-Red (VNIR-SWIR) payload, developed by ISRO.

“The mission will be launched next year and the French instruments have been delivered to India. They are currently being integrated, we are having regular technical exchanges with our colleagues at ISRO and everything is looking pretty fine as of now,” Mr. Venet said.

(The reporter is in Paris at the invitation of France’s Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs to cover the International Space Summit)