BENGALURU: That India’s space capabilities allow its armed forces to be more effective in planning is no secret. But here’s the extent of India’s reach: Information accessed from the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) shows our satellites keep a watch over the entire Pakistan and provide high definition mapping of 87% of the neighbour’s land area, providing vital inputs to the armed forces’ operations like the Balakot airstrikes on Tuesday.
Indian satellites are able to map all terrains across 7.7lakh sqkm of Pakistan’s total 8.8 lakh sqkm of land area, giving Indian commanders access to high resolution images of 0.65 metre.

India has similar capabilities for other neighbouring nations — our satellites can map about 5.5 million sqkm of land spread across 14 countries — but details about China were not immediately available.
“This coverage is just from the Cartosat family of satellites. There are an array of services that Isro provides, but we cannot comment on everything in public,” a source said.

On January 17, junior space minister Jitendra Singh said that India can peep into Pakistan homes, and it appears he wasn’t joking. “India’s integrated border management system allows India to look into the verandahs and rooms of houses of people across the border in Pakistan,” he said.

The Indian Air Force (IAF), which has a demand for more satellites is happy with the services being provided by Isro. On a specific question, an Air Marshal commanding a top facility said last week: “Do we need more satellites? Yes. But nearly 70% of our demand has already been met and we are on track.”

Among the major satellites that have helped the Indian armed forces are the series of Cartosat satellites, GSAT-7 and GSAT-7A, Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) constellation, the Microsat, Risat and the HysIS (Hyper-spectral Imaging Satellite). If we count individual spacecraft, then more than 10 operational satellites are of use to the military.

As reported by TOI first, the first major use of the Cartosat family of satellites had, in fact, aided India’s surgical strikes across the Line of Control (LoC) in September 2016. Isro has been providing images to the armed forces, the Army in particular.

Cartosat provides ‘area of interest’ (AOI) images based on specific requests. Isro has the capability of providing one or more scenes/images covering the AOI as specified in a single polygon (all the areas in one circle) in the form of a shapefile (non-topological geometry and attribute information for the spatial features).

According to the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) in Hyderabad, AOI products are of two types — standard and precision-based ortho (where images taken from space are corrected to have a uniform scale) — both of which are useful for the armed forces. Ortho rectified products are corrected for terrain distortions and camera tilt effects.

While the first Cartosat was launched in 2005, Cartosat-2A launched in 2007 was the first dual-use satellite with capabilities of monitoring missile launches in India’s neighbourhood.
Cartosat-2C, launched in June 2016, can record videos of sensitive targets from space, compress them, and relay to earth. The next in the series, Cartosat-2E, was launched in June 2017. Isro launched a bevy of other satellites for military use in 2018 too.

Graphics: U Tejonmayam