TRISHNA satellite is in advanced stage of realisation, says ISRO official

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.