India successfully launched an Israeli spy satellite into orbit on Monday January 21, 200. The launch of the TECSAR satellite by an Indian-made rocket was carried out in clear weather at 9:15 am local time (0345 GMT) from the Sriharikota space station in southern India.

TECSAR Satellite Sensor

TECSAR is a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Technology Satellite. The design, development and fabrication activities of the satellite were led by MBT Space, a division of the Israeli Aerospace industries with the participation of other high tech industries such as ELTA, Tadiran Spectralink, Rafael. The satellite is equipped with a SAR payload with the capability to see through the clouds and carry out day and night all weather imaging.

India wants to compete alongside the United States, Russia, China, the Ukraine and the European Space Agency in offering commercial satellite launch services.The successful launch showed that India had launch capability showed a major step forward in India’s efforts to penetrate the global satellite market.

Monday’s mission was the eleventh consecutive successful launch carried out by the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, which is also slated to launch India’s first spacecraft to the moon, Chandrayaan-1, later this year. The first images will be transmitted after 14 days and will be the first of its kind from the most advanced systems developed in Israel.

India started its space programme in 1963, and has since developed and put its own satellites into space. It carried out the first successful launch of a domestic satellite, which weighed 35 kilograms, by an Indian-built rocket, in 1980.

This entry was posted by Monique Romeijn on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Remote Sensing and Image Processing, Satellite Image Data, Satellite Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.