India and Brazil Wednesday signed an agreement in Brasilia on cooperation in augmentation of a Brazilian earth station for receiving and processing data from Indian Remote Sensing satellites (IRS), the Prime Minister's Office said.

 

 The PMO said in a statement that the agreement provides for the reception of data from  AWiFS and LISS-III payloads of IRS satellites, including but not limited to the Resourcesat-2 at Cuiaba earth station in Brazil on a government-to-government cooperation basis.

 

 The agreement designates the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the Brazilian executive agency for earth observation data reception, processing, archiving, and distribution, to take responsibility and to work together with the Indian Space  Research Organisation (ISRO) and its executive agency , the National Remote Sensing  Centre, in order to accomplish the actions in the agreement.

 

 The agreement obliges ISRO to make available to INPE remotely sensed data of areas within the acquisition radius of INPE's earth station in Cuiaba acquired by AWiFS and LISS-III payloads of IRS satellites, as agreed by the two countries.

 

 The financial arrangement stipulated that INPE will, with its own regular budgetary resources, bear the cost for augmentation of the existing Resourcesat-1 hardware infrastructure at Cuiaba ground station for the purpose of receiving Resourcesat-2 data and for other IRS satellite data.