ISRO’s state-of-the-art remote sensing satellites – Cartosat-1 and Cartosat-2 are sitting pretty in their respective orbits rearing to earn millions for the country’s space research organistion. With resolution capacities that match the best of the satellites in the world, the Carto series is pegged to bag a major chunk of the world market for satellite imagery. Let’s take a peek into the technicalities, resolution and application utility of these indigenously-made orbs.
CARTOSAT-1
It is the eleventh satellite in the IRS satellite series meant for cartographic purposes. Weighing about 1560 kg at lift-off, Cartosat-1 carries two state-of-the-art high resolution panchromatic (PAN) cameras that take black and white stereoscopic pictures of the earth in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The swath covered by these cameras is 30 km and their spatial resolution is 2.5 m. The cameras are mounted on the satellite in such a way that near simultaneous imaging of the same area from two different angles is possible, facilitating the generation of three-dimensional maps. The cameras are steerable across the direction of the satellite’s movement to facilitate the imaging of an area more frequently. The images taken by Cartosat-1 cameras are compressed, encrypted, formatted, stored in a solid state recorder with a capacity of 120 GB and transmitted to the ground stations, where they are reconstructed and the data retrieved.