India began the development of an indigenous Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) programme to support the national economy in the areas of agriculture, water resources, forestry and ecology, geology, water sheds, marine fisheries, coastal management, weather forecast and natural disaster management.

IRS satellites are the mainstay of National Natural Resources Management System, for which the Indian Department of Space is the main agency.

Data from the IRS satellites were received and disseminated by several countries. New applications in the areas of urban sprawl, infrastructure planning and other large-scale applications for mapping have been identified with the advent of higher-resolution satellites.

IRS-1C was a three-axis body-stabilised spacecraft. The attitude was sensed by star sensors, Earth sensors and gyros.

IRS-1C and IRS-ID introduced a heavier, more capable Earth observation platform. The spacecraft structure consisted of the main platform and the payload platform which is an aluminium honeycomb structure. The bus consisted of a central cylinder (930 mm diameter x 1123 mm) attached to the bottom and the top decks on four sides of the spacecraft. In addition, a thermally isolated payload deck was introduced for better alignment stability for payload instruments.

The mission was in a polar Sun-synchronous orbit with an altitude of 817 km. The local equatorial local crossing time was 10:30am, flying north-south. There was a 24 day revisit period.

Mission control was handled by ISTRAC in Bangalore, India with telemetry, tracking and command at further ground stations in Lucknow, Biak and Mauritius. Data reception is done at NRSC, Shadnagar, India and DLR in Neustrelitz, Germany.

• IRS-1C on the GAF Website*
• IRS-1C on the eoPortal*

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