India and the French National Space Agency plan to launch a satellite together in order to study changes in the environment.

The satellite, Saral, will contain an altimeter, AltiKa, to study the sea surface heights and a satellite-based data collection platform, Argos.

Saral-AltiKa will have two independent payloads, Argos-3 and Altika, which will study Earth’s environment from space.

The satellite is expected to be useful for ocean scientists studying the sea state, light rainfall climatalogy, mean sea level and coastal altimetry.