In 2009, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had launched the RISAT-2, a spy satellite acquired from Israel for $110 million. In the last week of April this year, ISRO successfully launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sriharikota, its first indigenously produced “spy satellite” RISAT-1, aboard the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) C19. It inserted the 1,858-kg radar imaging satellite into a polar circular orbit at an altitude of 480 kilometres and an orbital inclination of 97.552 degrees. The mission was proclaimed to be a grand success. RISAT-1 has day and night capability and can see through cloud cover or any other atmospheric obscurity. Orbiting the Earth 14 times a day, it will give India continuous surveillance capability. Meant primarily for a number of civilian applications, the all-weather surveillance tool can also function as a “spy satellite”. RISAT-1 carries a C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar operating in a multi-polarisation and multi-resolution mode and can provide images with coarse, fine and high spatial resolutions of about one metre. It has a mission life of five years.
