The core objective of the ResourceSat-2 mission is to support remote sensing data for integrated land and water resources management at micro level, with improved spectral and spatial coverage. The mission provides systematic and repetitive coverage of Earth’s surface under nearly constant illumination conditions. The data supports many projects in diversified fields of applications like agricultural crop discrimination and monitoring, crop acreage / yield estimation, precision farming, water resources, forest mapping, infrastructure development, disaster management, snow and glacier studies, coastal zone management, urban landscape, locating groundwater potential zones and more.

ResourceSat-2 provides continuity and increases the observation timeliness (repetivity) in tandem with ResourceSat-1.

The satellite is designed to provide both multi-spectral and panchromatic imagery of Earth’s surface. The payload system comprises of three optical remote sensing cameras. All three cameras work on the ‘pushbroom scanning’ concept using linear arrays of Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs). In this mode of operation, each line of image is electronically scanned and contiguous lines are imaged by the forward motion of the satellite.

ResourceSat-2 has the capability to capture the data globally through the on-board Solid State Recorder having 400 GB capacity apart from making the data available to the ground stations in real time.

The improvements over ResourceSat-1 are:

• LISS-IV MX operation with 70 km swath for Indian foot print and flexibility to operate in 23 km swath.
• AWiFS data with 12 bit radiometric resolution.
• LISS-III and LISS-IV data with 10 bits radiometric resolution.
• Enhanced power to facilitate increased operations per orbit.
• Improved SSR capacity of 200GB and an extra of 200 GB only for 70 km MX data