IRS MISSIONS

Indian Remote Sensing satellite
Indian Remote Sensing satellites (IRS) are a series of Earth Observation satellites, mostly built, launched and maintained by Indian Space Research Organization of India as part of the Indian space program. The IRS series provides remote sensing services to the country.
1. The IRS system
Following the successful demonstration flights of Bhaskara 1 and Bhaskara 2 satellites launched in 1979 and 1981, respectively, India began to develop indigenous IRS (Indian Remote Sensing Satellite) program to support the national economy in the areas of agriculture, water resources, forestry and ecology, geology, water sheds, marine fisheries and coastal management. Later India established the National Natural Resources Management System (NNRMS) for which the Department of Space (DOS) is the nodal agency, providing operational remote sensing data services. Data from the IRS satellites is received and disseminated by several countries all over the world. With the advent of high resolution satellites new applications in the areas of urban sprawl, infrastructure planning and other large scale applications for mapping have been initiated.
The Indian Remote Sensing Satellite system is the largest constellation of remote sensing satellites for civilian use in operation today in the world. With the launch of CARTOSAT-2A, the constellation now has eight satellites in operation – IRS-1D, OCEANSAT-1, Technology Experiment Satellite (TES), RESOURCESAT-1, CARTOSAT-1, CARTOSAT-2 and the latest CARTOSAT-2A and IMS-1. All these are placed in polar sun-synchronous orbit and provide data in a variety of spatial, spectral and temporal resolutions to enable several applications to be undertaken relevant to the national development.
2. IRS data applications
Data from Indian Remote Sensing satellites are used for various applications of resources survey and management under the National Natural Resources Management System (NNRMS). Following is the list of those applications:
Preharvest crop area and production estimation of major crops.
Drought monitoring and assessment based on vegetation condition.
Flood risk zone mapping and flood damage assessment.
Hydro-geomorphological maps for locating underground water resources for drilling well.
Irrigation command area status monitoring
Snow-melt run-off estimates for planning water use in downstream projects
Land use and land cover mapping
Urban planning
Forest survey
Wetland mapping
Environmental impact analysis
Mineral Prospecting
Coastal studies
Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development (initiated in 1992) for generating locale-specific prescriptions for integrated land and water resources development in 174 districts.