Russia has pushed back the launch of its first radar Earth observation satellite Obzor-R to next year, Valery Zaichko, a senior official at state space agency Roscosmos, said Saturday
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 29th May, 2021) Russia has pushed back the launch of its first radar Earth observation satellite Obzor-R to next year, Valery Zaichko, a senior official at state space agency Roscosmos, said Saturday.
The Obzor-R radar satellite was supposed to be launched atop the Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the third quarter of 2021.
"The first Obzor-R will be launched in 2022," Zaichko, deputy director of the Department of Navigational Space Systems, told the Roscosmos magazine "Russian Space."
The schedule has been changed several times already. The launches, originally scheduled for 2018 and 2020, were postponed to 2021 and 2023. However, Roscosmos earlier told Sputnik that the launch of the second Obzor-R is not planned earlier than 2026.
According to the Roscosmos official, the current constellation of Russian civilian Earth observation satellites consists of 11 spacecraft, with none of them currently using the radar technology.
Obzor-R features a high-resolution radar that can provide images of Earth's surface in any weather and time of day. With the resolution of 30cm/pixel, the satellite can have a number of applications, including cartography, sea-faring safety, monitoring of natural and man-made disasters, scouting for natural resources and gathering data for agricultural purposes.
