FRANCE-BRAZIL SPACE COOPERATION - CNES AND AEB SIGN FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT

Tuesday 22 June, CNES Chairman & CEO Philippe Baptiste held a videoconference meeting with Carlos Augusto Teixeira de Moura, President of the Brazilian space agency AEB, to review future opportunities for the two agencies to work together and to sign a new framework cooperation agreement.

This agreement seeks to give new momentum to France and Brazil’s relations in space across a broad spectrum of domains including Earth observation, space science and technologies, education, telecommunications, astronomy and astrophysics, and space applications.

Two priorities have already been mapped out: first, cooperation on scientific ballooning, with efforts to identify an intertropical launch site; and second, a high-value science dialogue with AEB in the field of hydrology applications linked to CNES programmes, notably the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) and SMall Altimetry Satellites for Hydrology (SMASH) missions.

CNES’s Chairman & CEO hailed these promises of future cooperation and thanked his counterpart for his involvement in recent Steering Committee meetings of the Space Climate Observatory (SCO), of which Brazil is a founding member since signing the Joint Declaration of Interest at the Paris Air Show in June 2019.

Space cooperation between France and Brazil is underpinned by an Intergovernmental Agreement on the study and peaceful uses of outer space, signed in 1997. In 2008, CNES and AEB established a framework programme and signed three specific agreements extending their cooperation to a range of fields including agriculture, efforts to curb climate change, natural disaster mitigation, environmental preservation and natural resource management, telecommunications, satellite navigation and the development of a minisatellite bus.

CONTACTS
Pascale Bresson     Press Officer     Tel: +33 (0)1 44 76 75 39    pascale.bresson@cnes.fr
Raphaël Sart    Head of Media    Tel: +33 (0)1 44 76 74 51    raphael.sart@cnes.fr