The Hindu Business Line : Cartosat-2 launch pushed to Nov

Cartosat-2, ISRO's hottest earth imaging satellite yet, may be put in orbit a month later than planned. It now looks set for a late November flight, according to officials at the space agency.

The interest in Cartosat-2, which will be the nation's second `mapping' satellite since May 2005, is in its high resolution of one metre. This will make it the world's second best alongside Ikonos of the US that also gives 1-m imageries; and a close rival to Quickbird that offers an incredibly close 60-cm resolution; all of them from a distance of 800-900 km in space.

ISRO reached the 1-metre capability in October 2001 when it launched the Technology Experiment Satellite (TES). But that data is fully acquired and used by the defence forces and TES is also ending its term. Data from Cartosat-2 will be available for civil commercial applications, especially where details of small areas are needed. An agile camera allows itself to be pointed at specific areas.

Apart from the resolution, Cartosat-2 will also bring a noticeable cost difference to domestic civic planners, a senior ISRO official told Business Line. Currently a lot of customers in India are buying data from Ikonos (a private commercial US earth observation satellite) and also from Quickbird (owned by Digital Globe) but these charge around $18-25 per imagery of a 1-sq km area.

Cartosat-2, which will join the seven Indian Remote Sensing Satellites now in orbit - should be at least 5-8 times lower than these prices, the official said.

Currently, nearly 300 Indian users — among them municipal planners, infrastructure providers but largely defence agencies — are said to be buying 1-metre data from foreign satellites at costs ranging from Rs 30,000 to a few crores of rupees annually. Cartosat-2 could double this number by adding new national users who could not afford data from foreign satellites imageries; and also wean away existing users towards it.

"Cartosat-2 would be saving quite a lot of foreign exchange. When Cartosat-2 becomes operational, ISRO (through export arm Antrix) would be the only agency offering all imagery solutions from a single IRS family - from 1-metre imageries to 2.5m, 5m, 20m 56 m, Oceansat's 360m and even 1 km through a few INSATS (some that are equipped with cameras)," the official said.

NEW LAUNCH DATE

Cartosat-2 is to be launched on the PSLV vehicle along with a space capsule recovery experiment (SRE); and two small foreign satellites.

According to its spokesman, Mr S. Krishnamurthy, ISRO has rescheduled the October 22 launch of Cartosat-2 to the third week of November.