Cartosat-1
CARTOSAT 1 is a stereoscopic Earth observation satellite in a sun-synchronous orbit. The satellite was built, launched and maintained by the Indian Space Research Organisation. Weighing around 1560 kg at launch, its applications will mainly be towards cartography in India. It was launched by the PSLV on 5 May 2005 from the newly built second launch pad at Sriharikota. Images from the satellite will be available from GeoEye for worldwide distribution.
CARTOSAT-1 carries two state-of-the-art panchromatic (PAN) cameras that take black and white stereoscopic pictures of the earth in the visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The swath covered by these high resolution PAN cameras is 30 km and their spatial resolution is 2.5 metres. The cameras are mounted on the satellite in such a way that near simultaneous imaging of the same area from two different angles is possible. This facilitates the generation of accurate three-dimensional maps. The cameras are steerable across the direction of the satellite's movement to facilitate the imaging of an area more frequently. The images taken by CARTOSAT-1 cameras are compressed, encrypted, formatted and transmitted to the ground stations. The images are reconstructed from the data received at the ground stations.
CARTOSAT-1 also carries a solid state recorder with a capacity of 120 Giga Bits to store the images taken by its cameras. The stored images can be transmitted when the satellite comes within the visibility zone of a ground station.
