The Hindu Business Line : Cartosat may open up new market in remote sensing

CARTOSAT-1, now up in the air, will soon to be the world's first satellite to offer pure stereo or 3D earth imageries. It has already evoked interest among potential users for various map-based applications.

Stereo imaging is considered the next big thing in remote sensing. When commissioned in the next three months after tests, Cartosat is expected to open up new market opportunities in remotesensing for ISRO in both civilian and defence realms.

Along with Cartosat-2 that is slated for launch in over a year, this is expected to give a major push to map-based developmental and commercial applications; digital elevation models and value added products.

Mr K.R. Sridhara Murthi, Executive Director of ISRO's commercial arm Antrix Corporation, said the high resolution of 2.5 m for 3D pictures that Cartosat-1 would offer from its two cameras (again a first) does not exist in the market at present. As such, "There is interest from different quarters for doing business (in this) and a few customers are waiting to receive the data," he told Business Line.

This resolution in stereo, Mr Murthi said, can generate good maps and would be a spur to the digital terrain mapping industry. Potential users could be defence and security-related entities, private agencies that are into connectivity, infrastructure, road and oil pipeline alignment; real estate, mining companies; and government bodies involved in urban planning, resource and agri mapping.

When Cartosat-2 is launched, it would be offering far more superior products of the order of 1 m - the size of objects that the eyes in the sky can pick up. Though ISRO reached the 1-m capability three years ago with its experimental satellite TES, these data are not commercially available.

The new data sets would add to Antrix's revenue, which touched Rs 370 crore for the year ended March 2005, Mr Murthi said. The turnover saw a growth of 25 per cent over the last fiscal.

Antrix has an exclusive marketing tie-up with Space Imaging (SI), a Lockheed-Raytheon company, to sell its imageries globally. While SI has data rights for the previous remote-sensor Resourcesat (IRS-P6), ISRO is yet to seal the deal for Cartosat.

Remote sensing - another name for specialised photographs of Earth taken from satellite cameras some 600 km in space - is easily the biggest global space market that India has captured. Antrix, with 20-25 per cent market, share figures among the five global majors. The entire global imagery market, dominated by US Landsat and French SPOT satellites is put at $ 400 million and growing.

Antrix has been upgrading equipment at its 12 ground stations in various countries with proprietary software and hardware to generate 3D pictures. It is also looking at new countries to put up ground stations.

Competition, too, was right behind, in the form of a forthcoming Japanese multiple-camera satellite; though the French SPOT was creating 3D images from a single camera, this was causing some loss in the area covered.

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