India has got a spy in the sky

-

India is going to put up an eye in the sky to boost its military intelligence. The spycraft, called the Communication-Centric Intelligence Satellite (CCI-Sat), will be operational by 2014 and will keep a watch on the trouble spots in the neighbourhood, especially China and Pakistan.

Developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the CCI-Sat is India’s first original spy satellite. It will be launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation within the next four years.

The CCI-Sat is capable of picking images and supporting communication (conversation between two satellite phones, for instance), besides surveillance. “The satellite will orbit Earth at an altitude of 500km and will cover hostile regions in India’s neighbourhood by passing on the surveillance data to the intelligence,” said G Bhoopathy, the director of the Defence Electronic Research Laboratory (DLRL), the lab that is working on the satellite.

“The focus is now space, we have to equip ourselves for electronic warfare from space too,” he said. The satellite will be equipped with synthetic aperture radar to take high resolution images of the target regions. Pegged at Rs100 crore, the satellite design and development will be made by the ISRO while the payload will be built by the DLRL. “We are in discussions with the ISRO at the moment,” Bhoopathy said.

India, with its Technology Experiment Satellite (TES), is already among the nations that have spy satellites. These include the US, Russia and Japan.

TES, which was launched in 2001, helped the US army with high-resolution images during the 9/11 counter against the
Taliban.

Besides TES, ISRO’s Cartosat series of satellites and the Radar Imaging Satellite (Risat-2) can also be used for surveillance and espionage. But the CCI-Sat is the first 100% spy satellite of India.

“This satellite will be much better than Risat-2,” Bhoopathy said.
ISRO is also planning to launch the Gsat-7 satellite to boost communication system for the Indian Navy. This would be launched later this year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Indigenous tank T-90 Bhishma rolls out

-
Image
The first batch of the indigenously built T-90 Bhishma tanks was on Monday (August 24) flagged off by Minister of State for Defence MM Pallam Raju at the rolling out ceremony held at the Heavy Vehicles Factory, Avadi, in Chennai. The T-90S tank incorporates many new technologies in terms of mobility, protection, fighting capabilities, safety and communication. The tank is equipped with 125mm smooth bore gun stabilised in Elevation and Azimuth, 12.7mm anti-craft machine gun and 7.62mm co-axial machine gun supported with high accuracy sighting systems and Automatic Loader ensuring high rate of fire. A significant feature of this tank is its capability to fire guided missile in addition to conventional ammunition using the same main gun barrel. The integrated fire control system consisting of the gunner’s sight, guided weapon system and ballistic computer facilitates accurate firing of conventional ammunitions as well as the guided missiles. The built in Explosive Reactive Arm
Read more

Second only to US IAF & Navy to get DRDO's CHAFF tech for protecting Aircrafts and Ships from enemy missile

-
Image
The Indian Air Force and Navy have partnered with the Defence Research and Development Organisation to acquire the CHAFF technology, which protects warships from anti-ship missiles during combat. After the United States, India is now the second country to develop this capability, signalling a major Aatmanirbhar push in the field of defence. The development is significant because the Indian navy is investigating the sinking of the Russian missile cruiser Moskva and concentrating on how to protect our warships from anti-ship ballistic missiles such as the Chinese DF-21. What exactly is CHAFF? CHAFF is a critical defence technology that protects fighter planes and naval ships from enemy radar-guided missiles during wartime. The importance of this technology stems from the fact that a small amount of CHAFF material deployed in the air acts as a decoy to deflect enemy missiles, ensuring the safety of fighter planes and naval ships. This advanced CHAFF technology was developed by the DRDO to
Read more

India built N-sub in Kalpakkam under codename 'PRP'

-
The secrecy attached to the development of the indigenous nuclear submarine project is almost legendary. What’s little known is the extent to which the Indian N-establishment went to conceal the research not only from the public but also large sections of the scientific community within the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). For almost nine years, most staff working at the Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research (IGCAR) in Kalpakkam believed the Plutonium Recycle Project (PRP) in the complex was used only for that purpose, that is recycling plutonium. But with the launch of INS Arihant on July 25, top DAE officials have finally begun to lift the veil and reveal that they were actually building the core (nuclear reactor and propulsion systems) of the submarine as well as the land-based version of the hull of the indigenous vessel, which served as the technology demonstrator of the main vessel, within the PRP unit. For those in the know, even the term ‘PRP’ denoted the N-sub.
Read more