Presently the AGEOS, at Bharati Station, Larsemann Hills, Antarctica is receiving IRS data from ISRO satellites like Resourcesat-2, Risat-2, the Cartosat family of satellites, Saral and Oceansat, and transferring the same to Shadnagar.
ISRO was supposed to establish a second data reception antenna at AGEOS in Antarctica this year.It will only be able to come up sometime next year.
While the existing data receiver antenna at Antarctica supplements Earth Observation (EO) data collection for ISRO, the second one is meant for two specific projects.
These two projects are Cartosat-3—which will have dual uses like its predecessor Cartosat-2 series, which provided data for India’s 2016 Surgical Strikes on Pakistan—and the proposed NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (Nisar) mission, expected to launch in 2022.
The $1.5 billion project, Nisar is a first of its kind endeavour that will be able to operate in two frequencies, both in bands lower than KU-Band or AA-Band.
While ISRO will develop and provide the S-band radar, expected to have a 12-cm wavelength, NASA will supply the 24-cm wavelength L-band radar.
ISRO will also provide the launch vehicle. The proposed second data reception terminal at Antarctica will support and act as a follow-on station to the one at Shadnagar.
Now ISRO, has drawn up plans to set up its first overseas ground station on the North Pole, primarily to augment the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) operations that are crucial not just for civilian needs like disaster management but also for the armed forces. This facility is coming up about two years behind a similar Chinese project.
Presently ISRO has a full-fledged IRS programme with a constellation of earth observation satellites, with the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad responsible for data acquisition and processing, data dissemination, aerial remote sensing and decision support for disaster management.
The hardware installation will be a complex task, and given the region’s extreme conditions—considered more difficult to deal with than the South Pole—the challenges will be more.
Elaborating the need for this, a scientist explained that with the advancements in high-resolution satellite programs of IRS, the complexity and role of ground stations have increased multifold.
“High-resolution satellites need frequent visibilities with larger processing power, data storage capacity onboard, data downlink of stored image to ground stations for meeting the global and Indian user requirements,” the scientist said.
ISRO wants to achieve a 14-orbit coverage, to realise which the ground station at North Pole is important… Because this will provide an opportunity to download the complete data within the same orbit and enable the usage of on-board resources in every orbit and to transfer the raw data in near real-time to Shadnagar,” the scientist said.
