NEW DELHI: India and the United States have agreed to sign a Technology Safeguard Agreement as part of the measures that will facilitate India to launch U.S. licensed satellites and also third country satellites carrying U.S. controlled items.

The pact would seek to safeguard the protected technologies of either country associated with such missions.

An India-U.S. fact sheet issued on Thursday during the visit of U.S. President George Bush here said the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have also formulated two memoranda of understanding that define the scope of the experiments and the sharing of responsibilities and data with regard to the two instruments from NASA that are to be flown as part of Chandrayaan, India's first lunar mission scheduled to be launched next year.

The instruments are a miniature synthetic aperture radar and a moon mineralogy mapper.

The radar will map the polar landscape and deposits of water in these cold traps up to a depth of a few metres.

The mineralogy mapper will assess the mineral resources of the moon and characterise and map the composition of its surface at high spatial resolution.

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