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VISION INTERVIEW

ISRO at its innovative best for nation building

Dr S Somanath, Secretary, Department of Space, and Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation, in an interview with Arup Dasgupta, Managing Editor, Geospatial World, unveils his vision and throws light on the achievements of the national space agency. Following are the excerpts:

Credit: ISRO

S Somanath, Secretary, Chairman of ISRO. GEOSPATIAL ARTHA Volume 01 » ISSUE 01

On ISRO and innovation The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is home to many innovations currently taking place in all sectors of space technology: applications, spacecraft bus, launchers, and advanced technologies for payloads, exploratory missions, and science missions.

Innovation in communications We were able to build HighThroughput spacecraft in the last few years and put them in place, so that we have the capability to achieve something like 20 gbps.

But that is just not enough. I think the demand is much higher. This is one area where we have to innovate to create spacecraft buses for the future. There is no difficulty in doing so, but the real issue is: who is the user who wants it and who is going to deploy it and economically exploit it? We need optical communication links so that we can establish High Throughput and secure communications networks.

Here, we started with the small payloads demonstration, but it did not go far. We need to go further in creating very reliable optic communications networks.

Inter-satellite communication is another area that needs to be developed. We also have to go into various other bands in the communication domain. We have gone up to Ka; now we are moving to Q and V bands also.

These need to be developed and we have to deploy these bands for our regular communication use, including for various other institutional users and for commercial exploitation.

Innovation in remote sensing The demand for remote sensing data in various sectors