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Russia plans to have 20 remote sensing satellites by 2022 — Roscosmos

Besides,Russia plans to start creating a national remote satellite sensing center next year

MOSCOW, November 12. /TASS/. Russia plans to start creating a national remote satellite sensing center next year and, by 2022, the country is expected to have about 20 remote sensing satellites on the orbit, said Valery Zaichko, the deputy director of the navigational space systems department of Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos.

"By 2025, even starting from 2022, we plan to have about 15-20 spacecraft as part of Russia’s orbital group, including for hydrometeorological and radar survey, Zaichko said on Monday, during a conference, headlined ‘Modern challenges for remote sensing of the Earth from space.’

The official said that Russia’s current remote sensing orbital group has 11 satellites, mostly of the Kanopus family.

"We can get [imagery] of the same object on a daily basis, twice a day. In the course of one week, we make images of an area of about 17 million square kilometers," he said.

According to Zaichko, an Elektro-L satellite will be launched by the end of the year. Three more satellites, including Resurs-P and Meteor satellites, are to be put into the orbit by 2020. In the same year, Russia will start creating a space system headlined Arktika (Arctic).

In 2021, Russia plans to launch satellites of the Resurs-P, Meteor, Kondor-FKA, Obzor-R and Elektro-L series.

Remote satellite sensing center

In 2020, Russia plans to start creating its National Center for remote sensing of the Earth, similar to the existing National Defense Management Center of the Russian Defense Ministry and the National Crisis Situations Management Center of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations, Zaichko said.

"We have created an operator of remote sensing space systems, but we plan to go further. Today, at the basis of this operator, Roscosmos is establishing the National Center for Remote Sensing of the Earth from space," the official said.

He added that the center’s main facililty will be located in Moscow, and some of the auxiliary facilities - in the city of Kalyazin, on the basis of the deep space communications center.

The works are to begin in 2020 and are scheduled for completion in 2023.

Earlier this year, the Russian Space Systems holding company (a Roscosmos subsidiary) opened a ground center in the Antarctic for gathering and processing data from remote sensing satellites.

It became the first facility of Russia’s integral information system of remote sensing of the Earth in the southern hemisphere.

The full-scale operation of the integral information system of remote sensing of the Earth began in 2016. It consists of centers scattered over the whole territory of Russia - from the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad in the west to the Far Eastern Russian city of Khabarovsk, including the Arctic zone (an already operational center in Dudinka plus two planned facilities in Chukotka and Anadyr). The system ensures the centers’ cooperation with the cluster of remote sensing satellites, plans remote sensing, gathers and processes data and provides information to the end users.