The country will soon have its own Global Positioning System (GPS), albeit on a lower geographical scale, within the next few months once the last two remaining Cartosat satellites of the seven satellite constellation are put into the orbit by March end, said Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman A.S. Kiran Kumar on Wednesday.
“The next Cartosat satellite launch is scheduled for March 10 and another one for March end. With this we will have all the seven satellites in space covering 1,700 km. It will take two months for the satellites to become stable and by June, we can have our equivalent of GPS system covering the entire country and neighbouring areas too,” he said.
In an interaction at the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) after he addressed delegates attending the data users meet to share experiences and discuss new technologies among the geospatial community, Dr. Kumar emphasised that the indigenous GPS will “be more effective and accurate because all the seven satellites will be visible to the receiving stations at all times” unlike the latter.
The system has already been certified by the Civil Aviation Ministry and next generation aircraft may be sporting it. However, he was candid enough to state that taking the technology to mobile telephony like the current GPS will take some more time as “still lot of work” has to be done. It can be useful for devices bigger than the mobile phone and is every efficient,” he said. ISRO was also working on ways to reduce the time frame to six months from the current two years for accessing free data provided by its satellites. “The world is moving towards providing free data because the stakeholders can make value addition out of it,” Dr. Kumar pointed out.
And, from this month onwards the image resolution from ‘Bhuvan’, ISRO/NRSA web portal has been improved by 30 per cent to 50 per cent providing image resolutions from 2.5 metre to 1.5 metres. It will also be possible to provide 50 metres to 20 metres wide swath three tier improved resolution all the time. ISRO is also gearing up for launch of next Resourcesat and Insat3DR satellites later this year which will be able to provide data “every 15 minutes.” ‘Hyper spatial data’ is also being scouted through latest spatial instruments on airplanes to source minute data features from 57 different locations across the country of which 30 have been mapped. “Once the defence ministry clears we will be able to release it to our stakeholders,” the ISRO chairman added. NRSA Director V.K. Dadhwal was present.
ISRO is also gearing up for launch of next Resourcesat and Insat3DR
