The next meeting of India-U.S. Civil Space Joint Working Group (CSJWG) will be held in Bengaluru in August.

Eric Atkins, Public Diplomacy Officer, U.S. Consulate General, said on Monday that in the CSJWG experts from the U.S. and India would hold bilateral meetings.

“The very next collaboration on the calendar is the next meeting of the CSJWG, which is being held here in Bengaluru. A bilateral meeting of experts from the U.S. and India will be held in the first week of August,” he said.

The CSJWG was established in 2005 and over the years, officials from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and experts from other Indian government agencies have held discussions with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. government agencies.

The two countries have had a strong bilateral cooperation in space and collaborated on various space programmes, including the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission which was launched in 2025.

Swati Mohan, space scientist and project manager for AstroNav at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), who is on a visit to Bengaluru, during an interaction with reporters, highlighted the achievements of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover.

“The Perseverace Rover has had a phenomenal run, its prime mission was designed for about three Earth years which it has exceeded. It is still running strong. Its primary objective is to collect samples that could hold the science of past life on Mars, and it has done that successfully,” said Dr. Mohan.

The Bengaluru-born space scientist added that samples collected recently from the Cheyava Falls in Mars have shown evidence of potential signs of past life on the Red planet and NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has completed more than 70 flights over the Mars since 2021.

“Mars is the closest planet to Earth. It has a similar gravity, and it has an atmosphere but not like a runaway atmosphere like Venus. Mars has temperatures that are slightly colder but in range of the Earth. Many minerals and components that we find on Earth are also found there, besides it is close enough to get there in a reasonable amount of time,” Dr. Mohan, on the reason for sustained interest in the Red planet, said.

Published - July 20, 2026 09:19 pm IST