Tuesday, May 17 2005 09:51 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Thiruvananthapuram: Terming the recently launched CARTOSAT-1 as "one of the coveted National assets", Indian Space and Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G Madhavan Nair yesterday (May 16, 2005) said the state-of-the-art remote sensing satellite would be used for civilian applications for the next one year.

Nair said the satellite, which carries the Panchromatic cameras that take black and white stereoscopic pictures of the Earth in the visible region on the electromagnetic spectrum, would be utilized for mapping purposes.

The CARTOSAT-2 was getting integrated and would be ready for launch by this year-end. "The CARTOSAT-2 is more flexible and it can be steered to different regions. It can map more areas on single pass over the country," he said.

Stating that the both CARTOSAT and HAMSAT were working well and its results were satisfactory, he said the images could be used for town planning purposes and 160 towns in the country needed to be mapped to assess the need for putting up infrastructure.

Referring to commercial utilization of the satellite, he said countries like South Africa, Brazil, Chile, Germany had already made a request for providing satellite images of their countries adding already the IRS satellite had been earning a revenue of Rs 15 crore per year and ISRO plans to double this revenue with the new launch.

Nair said ISRO's first commercial use of PSLV would be made in the first part of next year by launching an Italian satellite "Agile". It would carry a payload of 350 kg, he said.