India will tomorrow inaugurate a new launch pad at its Satish Dhawan space port near Chennai, on the south-east coast, by putting the world's first stereographic mapping satellite into orbit.
If Cartosat-1 reaches its destination 620km above the earth, Indian rockets will have achieved 12 consecutive successful launches over 12 years.
The impressive record of the home-grown Indian space programme is not fully appreciated outside the country, says Madhavan Nair, its leader.
Although India attracted worldwide headlines last year with its decision to send a probe to the moon in 2007-08, its achievements so far have been in earth's orbit, with missions designed primarily to “bring the benefits of high technology to the people and particularly the poor people of India”.
The most innovative feature of the 1.6-tonne Cartosat-1 is its pair of cameras, which will give stereo images of the earth's surface that can distinguish features down to 2.5 metres across. They will directly generate three-dimensional maps that have until now been achievable only indirectly, by combining data from a large number of satellite passes over the same place.
“Such a stereographic imaging system does not exist in the civil sector anywhere else,” says Mr Nair, chairman of the Bangalore-based Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro). “It will give information about heights that will be very useful in applications such as planning power lines.”
Cartosat-1 will join what is already the world's largest cluster of non-military remote sensing satellites. Six Indian spacecraft are already observing the earth with a wide range of instruments.
The data are used in agriculture, water planning, urban development, mineral prospecting, drought and disaster relief, and various environmental applications. In areas where Isro advises villagers where to dig new wells, for example, satellite-based hydrological mapping has raised the average success rate in finding clean water from 30 to 90 per cent, Mr Nair says.
The other arm of the Indian space programme is the Insat series of telecommunications and broadcasting satellites, which have given 90 per cent of the population access to satellite television. The most recent launch, late last year, was Edusat, around which a new distant learning network is being built.
Isro is developing two categories of rocket. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicles are designed for earth observation and scientific missions, such as Cartosat-1 and the forthcoming Chandrayaan moon mission, which will apply Indian remote sensing skills to map the physical and chemical properties of the lunar surface.
The larger Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicles carry communications satellites into geostationary orbit 36,000km above the earth, at which they can “hover” above the same place.
These rockets are not yet powerful enough for India's heaviest satellites, which have been launched on Europe's Ariane. But Isro plans to become self-sufficient in this sector too from 2008, when its GLSV-3 launcher is due to be ready to lift four-tonne satellites into geostationary orbit.
In preparation for the increasing activity, Isro has built the second launch pad at Satish Dhawan, which the Cartosat-1 mission will inaugurate.
Although the Indian space programme has aimed to be as self-reliant as possible since it began in the early 1970s, it has always worked to some extent with other space agencies. While Isro was developing its own rockets it used Russian, US and European launchers.
Mr Nair says Isro is keen to collaborate more with its international counterparts.
“We are trying to establish co-operation with Nasa and Noaa [the US space and remote sensing agencies] and there is dialogue going on about carrying a US instrument on our moon mission,” he says. “The European Space Agency recently declared that three of its instruments would travel on Chandrayaan.”
Last month Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, visited Isro's satellite centre in Bangalore, raising the prospect of space collaboration between China and India.
But India is not yet thinking of joining any international venture to Mars or planning manned missions. “That would be prohibitively expensive and we are working on a shoestring budget,” Mr Nair says.
The agency's government funding rose from Rs22.7bn ($525m, €405m, £273m) in 2003-04 to Rs25.4bn in 2004-05 and is set to rise to a projected Rs31.5bn in 2005-06 twice what the UK government will spend this year on all its space activities.
Isro's work is not commercially driven, Mr Nair makes clear: “Our main mission is to make high technology serve society and poor people in particular.”
