Sowing the seeds of an ambitious satellite programme

The IRS-1A, India's first remote sensing satellite, for the uses of mapping the earth for agricultural, resource and defence purposes, was launched today in 1988.

The IRS-1A; Source: Public Domain

The Indian space programme had just started its upward spiral in the 1980s, launching a series of satellites with the help of Soviet launchpads at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Now began the launching of satellites perhaps considered the modern hallmark of the ISRO satellites, the Indian Remote Sensing Satellites (IRS).

India wanted these satellites to provide imagery for agriculture, forestry, hydrology and geology - and on the 17th of March, 1988, as the IRS-1A blasted off on a Vostok 2M rocket, India knew its work had just begun towards building a more comprehensive remote sensing satellite network and capability.

The satellite was small, but the mission it intended to do was big. The spacecraft contained 3 linear imagining self scanner - LISS - cameras, and would give spatial resolutions of upto 72 and 36 metres. Operating in a Sun-synchronous orbit - aligning itself with the sun, the IRS-1A would finish its mission by July 1996. A full 8 years of mission, when it had been planned for 3 initially.

The first mission was a part research, part operational and part experimental one, for India would need to develop an entire system around how to develop the expertise in satellite imagery at home - relying on foreign satellites cost a large amount of money and resources.

The need for an indigenous remote sensing programme had also been realised by the fact that countries like the US had explicit restrictions back then on technologies like Remote Sensing and other tools - necessitating that the sooner India could launch the IRS, the sooner it would be able to launch further research into this field, as no outside expertise was going to be there to guide it.

The IRS programme’s intention was to create new opportunities for Indian researchers, the development of new technologies, and data on how to utilise the resources of the earth better - which it so far succeeds in!