Space Imaging Has Exclusive Rights to India's CARTOSAT-1

Space Imaging (CO, USA) has announced it will soon offer satellite ground station access and sell imagery from Indian Space Research Organization's (ISRO) newest satellite CARTOSAT-1 (P-5), which has been launched on 5 May. Space Imaging has an exclusive sales and marketing agreement through 2010 with Antrix Corp., a division of the ISRO, which covers worldwide rights to sell imagery outside of India. The agreement covers sale of imagery and direct ground station access to the CARTOSAT-1, RESOURCESAT-1 and the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) 1-C and 1-D satellites.

CARTOSAT-1 has two panchromatic cameras that take black- and-white stereoscopic images in the visible light spectrum at a resolution of 2.5 metres. The cameras cover a swath of about 30km and take images of the same area during the same pass from two different angles. The stereo images can be used to create accurate elevation data of the Earth and create three- dimensional image maps. Since the cameras are steerable, CARTOSAT-1 has a revisit time over any part of the Earth every five days. CARTOSAT-1 also has an onboard storage capacity of 120 Giga Bits to store images when not in contact with a ground station.

Data from CARTOSAT-1 will be used for large-scale mapping, urban and rural development, land and water resources management, disaster assessment, relief planning and management, environmental impact assessment and various other geospatial and mapping applications. The data is also ideal for updating topographic maps.