EOS-01 Launched Today
- 07-Nov-2020
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India’s Latest Earth Observation Satellite
India sent its first space mission in almost a year with a launch of EOS-01, an earth observation satellite, this afternoon. EOS-01, along with nine satellites from foreign countries, was launched by a PSLV rocket twelve minutes past three.
This is ISRO’s first mission since the launch of RISAT-2BR1, another earth observation satellite similar to EOS-01, on December 11 last year. After that, ISRO had also sent communication satellite GSAT-30 in space in January this year, but that was done using an Ariane rocket launched from French Guiana.
Thereafter, ISRO’s launch schedule was entirely derailed by the coronavirus epidemic. ISRO had planned more than 20 satellite launches in the fiscal year 2020-21, including high profile missions like Aditya L1, the first exploratory mission to Sun, and unmanned Gaganyaan, the precursor to India’s first manned space flight. Half of the planned launches were those of earth observation satellites like the one which were sent today.
EOS-01 is nothing but another Radar Imaging Satellite (RISAT) that will work together with RISAT-2B and RISAT-2BR1 launched last year. EOS-01 was initially named RISAT-2BR2, and was supposed to be the third of the three-spacecraft constellation aimed at providing all-weather round-the-clock service for high-resolution images.
Land and forest mapping and monitoring, mapping of resources like water or minerals or fishes, weather and climate observations, soil assessment, geospatial contour mapping are all done through earth-observation satellites.
