Last Monday morning the NovaSAR-1 satellite was delivered into orbit from the
Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India by Antrix Corporation – the
commercial arm of the Indian Space Research Organisation.
NovaSAR-1 carries an advanced form of radar technology known as S-band
Synthetic Aperture Radar, or S-band SAR, which will provide
high-resolution images of Earth from space.
Australia is one of the world’s largest users of satellite-derived
data, with most of that data coming from foreign satellites,
and so CSIRO has secured a 10 per cent share
of tasking and acquisition time on NovaSAR-1 over the next seven years.
This provides
significant opportunities to support a wide range of existing
research, further develop Australia’s Earth observation data analytics
expertise, and stimulate new commercial exploitation of this data.
CSIRO will operate our share of satellite time as a
national research facility, which will be managed by the new CSIRO
Centre for Earth Observation that sits within our space research
group.
More details are available from
this CSIRO blog post.
(Image credit: ISRO/Antrix)
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