In a major move, India has decided to strengthen its satellite connectivity to one of the most remote places on Earth: Antarctica.
A Rs 110 crore project has been launched to launch a stronger satellite link between India’s two research stations in Antarctica and ISRO’s Shadnagar Center in Telangana, separated by more than 11,000 kilometers.
News18 has a copy of a tender issued by ISRO’s National Remote Sensing Center in Hyderabad for the supply, installation and commissioning of a Ka-band satellite link for Antarctica.
“This is a great move that will bring better connectivity and enable satellite internet services with high data transfer,” a senior government official told News18.
This will be critical for the upcoming NISAR space mission led by scientists from India and the United States.
Launching in 2024, NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) will collect voluminous data on how ice sheets are changing down to fractions of an inch and sea level rise to understand the impact of global warming. The data could even exceed 80 terabytes a day.
Why is Antarctica important?
ISRO and the National Remote Science Center (NRSC) use India’s two Antarctic ground stations, Maitri and Bharati, which are located near the south pole, to obtain satellite visibility for further orbits.
These two ground stations acquire in real time the 14 or 15 orbits of Indian Earth observation satellites and transfer them to Shadnagar in India through satellite and ground networks.
The Shadnagar ground station can acquire data from remote sensing satellites only four times a day during ascending and descending orbits, but all polar remote sensing satellites, including SCATSAT-1, revolve around the Earth 14 to 15 times a day. . Therefore, the Antarctic stations were established.
India also sends 50-100 scientists to the remote continent every year. However, communication remains a major challenge for the frigid land, as the current satellite network has limited bandwidth. To transfer that amount of data, India has been using conventional means.
“The size of the continent is enormous and generates a multitude of scientific data that needs to be easily accessed. We also send 80-100 of our scientists to Antarctica each year, but there is currently no proper data connectivity. The entire operation is managed from here, almost 11,000 kilometers away, relying on other satellite services that offer limited coverage and connectivity. So we need stable connectivity as we have it for the mainland,” says Dr Thamban Meloth, Director, National Center for Polar and Ocean Research (NCPOR), Goa. “So many climate observations are collected every year that we are unable to handle due to lack of proper connectivity and access to bandwidth. A lot of this is real-time data that needs to be analyzed in time.”
Dr Meloth said that people working in Antarctica also need to be connected to their families, as well as to the outside world.
How the step could help
The move could provide important support to research activities in faraway lands by assisting in the timely transmission and processing of a multitude of scientific research data and operations files from the continent that remains isolated for at least six months of the year. As more network bandwidth becomes available, it will make healthcare via telemedicine easier for researchers.
The need for reliable, high-bandwidth communication services in Antarctica is becoming increasingly apparent. The scientists explain how most of the future scientific exploration of Antarctica will be done using satellite remote sensing to address the data transfer challenges researchers face. That is why several countries are discussing new opportunities to improve satellite communications in Antarctica.
The continent, which remains a no man’s land, is crucial because of its profound effect on Earth’s climate and ocean systems. It now has more than 90 active research stations from 54 countries with at least a thousand researchers at any time of the year.
Bid submission begins on May 26 and ends on September 22. A pre-bid meeting between NRSC and potential vendors interested in submitting proposals will be held on May 26 at its office in Shadnagar. The entire mission will cost around Rs 110 crore.
ISRO established the Antarctic Ground Station for Earth Observing Satellites (AGEOS), at Bharati Station, Larsemann Hills, Antarctica, to receive data from India’s Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS). This state-of-the-art advanced ground station was commissioned in August 2013 and receives data from IRS satellites (such as CARTOSAT-2 Series, SCATSAT-1, RESOURCESAT-2/2A, CARTOSAT-1) and transfers it to NRSC, Shadnagar, near Hyderabad.
Discover more from PressNewsAgency
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.