Thursday, January 20 2005 20:21 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Tirupati: India would put into space three satellites one for mapping applications and the other two with multiple uses this year, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) Chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair said in Tirupati today (Jan 20, 2005).

After inaugurating a three-day colloquim on International Network Of Tropical Atmosphere Radars (INTRA), Dr Nair told reporters that the ISRO will launch the CAROSAT-I in March end or April first week from Sriharikota.

The INSAT-4A and INSAT-4B would be launched from Kourou in French Guyana in June and December this year respectively.

No country in the world has space based system capacity to detect or predict natural calamities such as earthquake or its after-effects like Tsunami, he said, admitting that the ISRO had not been aware of the recent killer Tsunami.

'The Tsunami is an unexpected event that comes once in a century. Even the developed countries' satellites cannot pick up the images of the waves of the Tsunami as the height of the waves is very minimum,' he said.

ISRO is looking at developing data collection platform that can warn about Tsunami, a little bit in advance. Now, there were 200 weather centres in the country and 200 more such centres would soon be set up even in the ocean to know about the cyclones and typhoons in advance, he said.

The 3.5-lakh km long unmanned lunar mission by India will be conducted from Bangalore in 2007 end at a cost of Rs 380 crores.