RITSAT launched

RISAT-1, culmination of nearly 10 years of effort by SRO, has the capability to take images of Earth during day and night, as well as in cloudy conditions. Till now, India depended on images from a Canadian satellite as existing domestic remote sensing spacecraft cannot take pictures of Earth during cloud cover."The satellite can give valuable data like soil moisture, glacier positions and other details," the ISRO chairman said. The satellite has been successfully deployed at an altitude of 480 km, ISRO chief Radhakrishnan said, adding it would be raised to its desired altitude of 536 km of Polar Sunsynchronous Orbit in the next three days.