By IRNA,
New Delhi : With ocean scientists reporting a nine mm rise in sea levels in four years, India will launch an exclusive satellite later this year to study the changes in the environment.
The SARAL-Altika satellite will complement the current observations of the sea made by current satellites like Jason-2 of the French Space Agency and NASA.
“The SARAL-Altika to be launched by this year end will have a high-resolution altimeter in the Ka-band,” PTI reported quoting Marc Pircher, Director of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency as saying on the sidelines of the 97th Indian Science Congress in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala.
He said the satellite would be useful in studying the sea state, light rainfall climatalogy, mean sea level and coastal altimetry.
Shailesh Nayak, Secretary Ministry of Earth Sciences said that SARAL-Altika would help ocean scientists gather accurate data on the rise in the sea level which could threaten the low lying and coastal areas of the country.
“SARAL-Altika will have a Ka band altimeter which will measure the rise in the sea levels accurately than the current satellites,” he said.
SARAL-Altika, an Indo-French collaboration in the environment monitoring domain, will have two independent payloads ARGOS-3 and Altika whose objective would be to promote the study of the environment from space.
The 97th Indian Science Congress inaugurated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on January 3, 2010 hosted by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the University of Kerala.
The total number of delegates participating in the event is 7,000, with 5,000-odd delegates for the main event and over 1,500 school students for the National Children’s Science Congress that will be held along with the mega event.
The first meeting of the congress was held from January 15-17, 1914 at the premises of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, with the honourable Justice Sir Asutosh Mookerjee, the then Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University as President.
One hundred and five scientists from different parts of India and abroad attended the event. The 35 papers presented were divided into six sections including Botany, Chemistry, Ethnography, Geology, Physics and Zoology under six sectional presidents.