The three cameras on board Resourcesat-2 will be switched on when the satellite passes over 3,000 km of the Indian landmass from Joshimutt in Uttarakhand to Kannur in Kerala on April 28 and they will transmit pictures to earth. The cameras have been oriented. As soon as the satellite was put into orbit, its two solar panels unfolded themselves. All operations and checking the health of Resourcesat-2, that were required to be done before the cameras are switched on, have been completed. The National Remote-Sensing Centre at Shadnagar, near Hyderabad, has been geared to receive pictures of the earth from the satellite.
India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C16) placed three satellites, Resourcesat-2, Youthsat and X-Sat, in polar sun-synchronous orbit on April 20. They were functioning satisfactorily, said a press-release from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Monday. Commands for controlling Resourcesat-2 and Youthsat were being radioed from the ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network Centre (ISTRAC), Bangalore, which is connected to a network of stations situated in Lucknow, Mauritius, Biak in Indonesia, Svalbard in the North Pole and Troll in the South Pole.
While the ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore, built the Resourcesat-2, Youthsat has two payloads from India and one from Russia. The X-Sat is from the Nangyang Technological University, Singapore.
Resourcesat-2's orbit was trimmed on April 22 and the satellite is now placed in its final orbit with an apogee of 825 km, a perigee of 813 km and an inclination of 98.78 degrees. The accurate injection of the satellite into orbit will help save 20 kg of fuel aboard it, which will increase its life-span. Its mission life is five years.
Resourcesat-2 has a special three-tier imaging capability through its three cameras, with high, medium and coarse resolutions. The cameras can take pictures of the earth with swath as wide as 70 km, 141 km and 740 km. The images will help in determining the health and yield of crops, exploring minerals and ground water, identifying big schools of fish in the sea, noting the changes in the coastal areas, locating breeding grounds of mosquitoes, zeroing in on illegal ganja plantations in forests, mapping the advance of glaciers, predicting the onset of droughts and so on. These images will be used by more than 15 countries.
The health of Youthsat was normal, the ISRO press-release said, and the performance of its two Indian payloads too was normal. The Russian payload will become operational on April 29. The payloads will help in studying the various activities in the sun and their influence on the upper layers of the earth's atmosphere.
