President of the Brazilian Space Agency praises cooperation between China and Brazil

Cooperation in the space area is fundamental to the future of Latin America, and China is an important partner in this, said Marco Antônio Chamon, president of the Brazilian Space Agency, during the Space Cooperation Forum between China and Latin American Countries and the Caribbean, opened in Wuhan.

In Chamon’s opinion, China’s advances in recent years are impressive, drawing attention mainly to its achievements in the exploration of outer space. For Brazil, Chamon highlighted two important points: the evolution of launch capacity, with larger and more powerful equipment; and advances in the area of ​​Earth observation, particularly radar.

China and Brazil have a history of more than 30 years of space cooperation, which goes beyond the well-known CBERS earth resources satellite program. Chamon cited, for example, the joint laboratory for studies on space weather and the BINGO telescope for cosmology studies.

The representative of the Brazilian Space Agency stated that Latin America, like all regions of the world, depends today and will depend even more in the future on information obtained from space. More than areas of knowledge or applications, such as science, telecommunications or defense, space will make a significant contribution to global challenges such as climate change or plastic pollution at sea.

These challenges are interdisciplinary, involving several areas of knowledge and affecting different aspects of society, and no country will be able to solve them in isolation, he said.

Chamon showed confidence in the future of space cooperation between China and Brazil. “We are working together on an imaging satellite using radar technology which, for us, is very important as complementary information to the optical satellites that we already have in our partnership. The relationship with China is a long-term, fruitful and successful relationship, and I believe that we will still advance a lot in the direction of other satellites and other technologies.”