India to Launch First True Military Satellite in August
NEW DELHI, India, June 11, 2007 - Satnews Daily - After years of lobbying and clandestinely using dual use remote sensing satellites for military work, India’s armed forces will finally launch its first dedicated military satellite this August.
Cartosat-2A, which will carry an advanced synthetic aperture radar (SAR) made by Israel and a digital camera with a resolution of less than one meter, will give India the capability to monitor missile launches by rivals Pakistan and China. India will become the second Asian country after Japan with this advanced capability in which the U.S. is world leader.
This Indian government said Cartosat-2A will be launched on a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in the first week of August. Cartosat-2A is officially billed as a reconnaissance satellite, but will cater to military and intelligence needs better than any existing Indian satellite, claims the government.
Its launch will fulfill a long-standing demand from the Indian military for a dedicated reconnaissance spacecraft. Two more advanced imaging satellites will be launched in 2008 to give India a persistent space based capability to reconnoiter its region and rivals Pakistan and China. The satellite constellation will also study the oceans and monitor changes in winds across the seas.
Analysts say the digital cameras on board Cartosat-2A will be far superior to those now on India’s dual use, photo imagery satellite satellites. These include Resourcesat-1 launched in October 2003 and considered India's most sophisticated remote sensing satellite to date.
There’s the 2.5 meter, high-resolution Cartosat-1 equipped with two cameras able to point at an object from two different angles, thereby creating a two dimensional image of a target object. Another mapping satellite, Cartosat-2, which has a one meter resolution camera and a 120 gigabyte storage capacity for captured images, was launched in January 2007.
Cartosat-2 carries a state-of-the-art panchromatic camera that takes black and white pictures of the Earth in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The swath covered by these high-resolution PAN cameras is 9.6 km and their spatial resolution is less than one meter. The satellite can be steered up to 45 degrees along as well as across the track.
Cartosat-2 is an advanced remote sensing satellite capable of providing scene-specific spot imagery. The data from the satellite will be used for detailed mapping and other cartographic applications at cadastral level, urban and rural infrastructure development and management, as well as applications in land information systems and Geographical information systems.
TES with its one meter resolution camera, however, is India’s best provider of high quality satellite imagery. TES is the precursor of Cartosat-2A and has proven to India the value of a sharp-eyed lookout in space. During the start of the war in Afghanistan waged by the US-led international coalition forces in 2001, TES reportedly beamed one-meter high-resolution images of troop movements and coalition armored columns to India.
The pressing need for a spy satellite was strongly driven home, however, during the gory fight against Pakistan for the Kargil region in mid-1999. In the aftermath of that bloodbath, India came to the conclusion that satellite imagery could have warned them beforehand of Pakistani incursions, and avoided the much of the bloody fighting that followed.
One Indian military analyst cuttingly noted that India was so far behind in space based military systems that it would only realize its satellites had been destroyed by China when told so by the USA.
