Bangalore: India plans to launch a series of indigenously built military satellites with surveillance, imaging and navigation capabilities to keep a watch on its neighbourhood and help guide cruise missiles, a top defence scientist said on Saturday.
"There will be a series of (defence) satellites. I cannot give you the numbers because they are classified," VK Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said here.
"Each year, you will find one or two satellites going
up," added the Secretary, Defence R & D and Director General
of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
Mostly, these satellites are dedicated to different
defence applications and would have payloads which are for
surveillance, imaging, navigation and communication.
"You should be able to see with very high resolution and
precision the movements of troops and things like that (in the
neighbourhood)," Saraswat said. "You should be able to see
what are the new buildings and new facilities which have come
up".
India would be able to send data and commands through
these satellites to cruise missiles. "So it will have
tremendous applications", he said.
These defence satellites would be indigenously built and
launched from home soil only given the "security sensitivity",
Saraswat stressed.
"The Army, Navy and Air Force each have their own
requirement and it won't be appropriate to say how many each
of them would need, due to security considerations," Saraswat
said.
India has taken up development and launch of these
defence satellites under its space-based surveillance
programme, which has a road-map for setting up satellites for
all applications for the Army, Navy and Air Force, he said.
"Now, this road-map has been given to the Department of
Space and the Department of Space is taking its own schedule
for launching these satellites. We have only one Department of
Space and we have huge requirements...," he said.
Saraswat said India has already launched some satellites
under this programme.
PTI
First Published: Saturday, October 09, 2010, 16:10