AGREEMENT BETWEEN NASDA AND CNES ON AN ACTION PLAN FOR THE COOPERATION IN THE FIELD OF EARTH OBSERVATION FOR NATURAL DISASTER MONITORING

The National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA) and the Centre
National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) signed up the Agreement on an
Action Plan for Cooperation in the Field of Earth Observation for
Natural Disaster Monitoring on December 15 in Tokyo.

In this Agreement, NASDA and CNES agreed to initiate a cooperation in
the field of natural disaster monitoring by satellite, in order to
contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms causing natural
disasters and to the mitigation of resulting damage.

NASDA and CNES agreed upon an Action Plan which contains the
cooperative themes important for the above objectives. They also
agreed to hold an ad-hoc workshop focusing on natural disaster
monitoring to follow up the Action Plan, in cooperation with other
related organizations, before the end of 2000 in France.

The outline of the Action Plan is the following:

(1)establishment of the ALOS (NASDA’s Advanced Land Observing
atellite) Data European Node for European and African users under
CNES’ responsibility,

(2)study of ALOS – Interferometric Cartwheel (ICW), starting by a
preliminary definition phase, and

(3)research and future mission cooperation on natural disaster
monitoring and related Earth science and applications using
satellite instruments.

Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES)
http://www.cnes.fr/

Advanced Land Observing Satellite ALOS
http://yyy.tksc.nasda.go.jp/Home/Earth_Obs/e/alos_e.html