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India to launch three more remote-sensing satellites

Three new Indian remote sensing satellites -- IRS P4, IRS P5 and IRS P6, to be launched over the next three years, will increase the availability of data on the extent and state of natural resources in India.

This was stated by Dr D P Rao, director of the National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad, at the inaugural function of a three-day global conference on geoinformatics that opened at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing in Doon Valley yesterday.

IRS P4 will be launched from Sriharikota next May while IRS P5 will be launched within two years from now and IRS P6 within three years from now, said Rao, the chief guest, at the function attended by over 300 delegates from India and 38 other countries.

"Geoinformatics: Beyond 2000' has been organised by the IIRS to discuss and highlight the role of geoinformatics in natural resource assessment, monitoring and management. The event has been organised jointly by the IIRS and the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences from the Netherlands.

Rao said geoinformaics and satellite remote sensing were tools that enabled one to "think globally and act locally". Timely and reliable information about natural resources could be derived through these tools at regional as well as micro levels, he said.

Dr P S Roy, dean of the IIRS, said IRS-IC and IRS-ID were the most sophisticated civilian satellites in the world today, providing multi-spectral data with varying spatial resolutions useful for regional to micro-level mapping of natural resources.

Roy urged the scientific community to discuss geoinformatics on a multi-dimenstional plane as it was multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-technical. The IIRS, he said, looked forward to playing a lead role in capacity-building in space science and technology in the Asia-Pacific region.

Geoinformatics is the science and technology for collection, management, analysis and presentation of geographic and other spatially referenced data. It deals with information about features, phenomena and processes on and in the earth such as physical environment, natural and man made resources, their use and changes thereof. The innovations in geoinformation collection from space have come as a boon to tackle local as well as transnational problems.

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