India mulls launching series of military satellites

[EagleOne]

India plans to launch a series of indigenously built military satellites with surveillance, imaging and navigation capabilities to keep a watch on its neighbourhood and help guide cruise missiles, a top defence scientist said on Saturday.

"There will be a series of (defence) satellites. I cannot give you the numbers because they are classified," V.K. Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said here.

"Each year, you will find one or two satellites going up," added the Secretary, Defence R & D and Director General of Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).

Mostly, these satellites are dedicated to different defence applications and would have payloads which are for surveillance, imaging, navigation and communication.

"You should be able to see with very high resolution and precision the movements of troops and things like that (in the neighbourhood)," Mr. Saraswat said. "You should be able to see what are the new buildings and new facilities which have come up".

India would be able to send data and commands through these satellites to cruise missiles. "So it will have tremendous applications", he said.

These defence satellites would be indigenously built and launched from home soil only given the "security sensitivity", Mr. Saraswat stressed.

"The Army, Navy and Air Force each have their own requirement and it won't be appropriate to say how many each of them would need, due to security considerations," Mr. Saraswat said.

India has taken up development and launch of these defence satellites under its space-based surveillance programme, which has a road-map for setting up satellites for all applications for the Army, Navy and Air Force, he said.

"Now, this road-map has been given to the Department of Space and the Department of Space is taking its own schedule for launching these satellites. We have only one Department of Space and we have huge requirements...," he said.

Mr. Saraswat said India has already launched some satellites under this programme.


The Hindu : Sci-Tech / Science : India mulls launching series of military satellites

 

[EagleOne]

India to Launch Multiple Military Satellites in Coming Years reveals senior official

Press Trust of India attributes the following quotes to V.K. Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister:
-- "There will be a series of (defence) satellites. I cannot give you the numbers because they are classified"
-- "Each year, you will find one or two satellites going up"
-- "You should be able to see with very high resolution and precision the movements of troops and things like that"
-- "You should be able to see what are the new buildings and new facilities which have come up"
-- "India would be able to send data and commands through these satellites to cruise missiles. So it will have tremendous applications"
-- These defence satellites would be indigenously built and launched from home soil only given the "security sensitivity" Mr. Saraswat noted
-- "The Army, Navy and Air Force each have their own requirement and it won't be appropriate to say how many each of them would need, due to security considerations"
-- "India has taken up development and launch of these defence satellites under its space-based surveillance programme, which has a road-map for setting up satellites for all applications for the Army, Navy and Air Force"
-- "Now, this road-map has been given to the Department of Space and the Department of Space is taking its own schedule for launching these satellites. We have only one Department of Space and we have huge requirements"
-- Mr. Saraswat confirmed that India has already launched some satellites under this programme

India to Launch Multiple Military Satellites in Coming Years reveals senior official | India Defence

 

[Tshering22]

Aren't they supposed to keep these sorts of things a secret? Rather than blabbing them out and alerting the enemy, how about they first build the shield and 3 years later tell about it? Seriously, when will they learn from China to keep a secret?

 

[sesha_maruthi27]

Nice to see INDIA sending satellites for our defense purposes. Now when we have our own satellites there will be no need for us to depend on other countries for communications during air combats and also we can show the U.S. that we have more secured communications network.

 

[borgking82]

Mull? Just shut-up and do it already! Jeez! With loud mouth officials like Saraswat, no wonder there are lots of double agents in India's security service. I agree with Tshering22 on this one.

 

[sayareakd]

Aren't they supposed to keep these sorts of things a secret? Rather than blabbing them out and alerting the enemy, how about they first build the shield and 3 years later tell about it? Seriously, when will they learn from China to keep a secret?

we have 10 spy satellites as of now, ISRO just call them satellite which look to earth............so it was secret till now, in future they will have dedicate satellite for forces. Now a days it is hardly a secret with so many launches and site reserves for the satellites in space.

 

[plugwater]

Aren't they supposed to keep these sorts of things a secret? Rather than blabbing them out and alerting the enemy, how about they first build the shield and 3 years later tell about it? Seriously, when will they learn from China to keep a secret?

Secrecy does not work well in democratic country like us. Opposition will raise questions in parliament regarding where are all the money going into, Govt cant say that we are working on a secret cool project and you will see the results in next 5 years. So if you are in opposition party will you accept this answer ? Govt needed to announce the project and and its budget or else everybody will start shouting as if it is a corruption.

 

[sayareakd]

Secrecy does not work well in democratic country like us. Opposition will raise questions in parliament regarding where are all the money going into, Govt cant say that we are working on a secret cool project and you will see the results in next 5 years. So if you are in opposition party will you accept this answer ? Govt needed to announce the project and and its budget or else everybody will start shouting as if it is a corruption.

manc, did you forget the ATV project GOI spend thousands of crores on that project and Parliament of India is not aware about the same it did not reflect in any budget. So things can be well hidden in accounts.

 

[plugwater]

manc, did you forget the ATV project GOI spend thousands of crores on that project and Parliament of India is not aware about the same it did not reflect in any budget. So things can be well hidden in accounts.

Yes saya things can be kept secret but only to some extent . One or two project can be secretly funded but not everything. Since launching military satellites comes under both ISRO and DRDO its difficult to keep it secret, just my thought.

 

[sayareakd]

Yes saya things can be kept secret but only to some extent . One or two project can be secretly funded but not everything. Since launching military satellites comes under both ISRO and DRDO its difficult to keep it secret, just my thought.

This question has come lot of time and every one takes the GOI line that both are different institutions so that sanctions can not be placed on ISRO, but you keep forgetting that Dr. Kalam came from ISRO. BTW we dont test Agni too many times do you have any idea why ???

For military satellite no need of DRDO, Isro can deliver what ever forces want.

 

[plugwater]

This question has come lot of time and every one takes the GOI line that both are different institutions so that sanctions can not be placed on ISRO, but you keep forgetting that Dr. Kalam came from ISRO. BTW we dont test Agni too many times do you have any idea why ???

For military satellite no need of DRDO, Isro can deliver what ever forces want.

I really have no idea why agni was tested only few times!!

ISRO is entirely a civil institution atleast from outside. So DRDO has to take the burden of launching spy satellites by telling the outside world that ISRO is only launching the satellites commercially and DRDO has only built the satellite.

 

[SHASH2K2]

Any Idea about technical specification of these satellite. will it be like SAR we got from Israel or something else?

 

[Tshering22]

Secrecy does not work well in democratic country like us. Opposition will raise questions in parliament regarding where are all the money going into, Govt cant say that we are working on a secret cool project and you will see the results in next 5 years. So if you are in opposition party will you accept this answer ? Govt needed to announce the project and and its budget or else everybody will start shouting as if it is a corruption.

USA is a democracy and 30 countries in EU/NATO are democracies--- and MUCH BETTER, MORE HONEST, MORE TRANSPARENT, MORE SINCERE, MORE DEDICATED AND MORE MATURE democracies tha. our joke of a democracy. How do you think that these countries with all these much better freedoms, transparency, government benefits, good usage of people's taxes, excellent infrastructure, medical care etc is able to pull of such feat as maintain a secret as secret? Do you think these governments don't face questions from their Oppositions and Senates?

Do you seriously think that what USA, UK, France etc announce as weapon systems are the ONLY systems they're having? If so then drop the argument here itself, man. This is just the tip of iceberg. 95% of it is still not revealed to outside world, and why would they? They're not idiots like our Sarkari dodos who cannot keep a secret into their stomachs which the double agents working for ISI, Maoists and Heavens know what else organization, simply carry it to their overlords sitting in hiding. Look at the effect USA creates during their wartimes. Despite the fact that they keep talking, showing, promoting and boasting about their military might and equipment, they still manage to convey out nothing about anything. THAT my friend, is called tact-- something which our government needs to learn big time.

Arihant was a secret... how did the Congees manage to pull that off? Definitely its a multi-billion dollar project. How come it was only air and dust flying around until its revelation last year? You see, these are the flimsy excuse politicians make for their pathetic inability to keep matters into their stomachs so that their big shot announcements make them "heroic" in the eyes of people. And who're the ultimate losers? Us. Because the enemy has to simply insert his double agent into our group, get the overview of it and start building counter defenses immediately. So by the end of the project's completion (including cost over runs, delays, refusal of a million permits etc etc), we still happen to stand nowhere as the enemy has defenses for our offenses and we're right where we started.

 

[pmaitra]

I hope India completely masters the art of launching Geo-stationary satellites before making plans.

If we need these satellites soon, then we might as well hire some foreign launcher to do the job. It is difficult to rely on ISRO-GSLV i.e. still having issues with different components.

Although non-geo-stationary satellites can be used for spying, they have some significant problems and computational overhead:

• Requires frequent registration (Image registration - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) which has a lot of computational overhead such as thousands (millions for higher resolution image patches) of homographical computations (Homography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
• Constantly changing location of the satellite.
• The earth being spherical, many complex computations are best done using quarternions (Quaternion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) which is frequently used in the field of robotics, but makes computation very time-complex.
• Wastage of satellite 'live-time', i.e. only a fraction of the total length of the orbit is useful for spying while the rest is basically a free-float period when the satellite does not do much work.
• This also exposes the satellites to greater risks when it is over enemy territory. In case of attacks on the satellite itself, one cannot tell who did it if it is not directly over the territory of the country that launched it (however, if the satellite is intended to spy on a foreign country not in the neighbourhood, the risk is part of the ball game).

 

[plugwater]

Tshering22, Firstly you are comparing developed countries with us. Most of the other countries politician are educated enough to understand and keep their mouth shut in case of nation security or secret projects. Our politicians are not like that they always are trying and waiting to achieve some political gain if there is some wrong doing from our Govt. Secondly US defense budget is 600 billion and ours is 30 billion USD so allocating money for secret projects from US budget is very easy compared to ours without the knowledge of others. I am not telling we cant do anything secretly but only to some extent we can achieve secrecy. Every year there are some serious allegation going on in US regarding the missing of many billion USD from budget and nobody seems to care about that and i am pretty sure we wont take it lightly!!!

In US Black projects and secret projects comes under special access programs, Most of the special access programs are briefed to congress sub committee(core group), Defense contracts auditing agency is the only agency that have access to all these programs and the project details, specifications and budget are carefully checked and recorded in order to stop the politicians from using it as a politician gain. We are lacking in this kind of systems and we have other more important needs(Infra, education, etc) to be taken care of rather than funding and doing research in secret projects. Anyway we are doing as mush as possible to keep certain project like arihant secretly and we also succeeded in that and i hope many more will come.