Uttarakhand to get India’s first commercial space situational awareness observatory

Uttarakhand, Sept 2nd, 2022: India’s very first commercial space situational awareness observatory is all set to open in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand.

Set up by a space sector set-up of India called Digantara, the observatory will be able to track objects as small as 10cm in size that are orbiting the Earth.

The space situational awareness (SSA) observatory will assist in tracking any activity in space including that of space debris and military satellites hovering over the region.

Anirudh Sharma, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Digantara said, “The observatory in Uttarakhand will fill the crucial gap in SSA observations in the region as there is a lack of such facilities between Australia and southern Africa”.

The observatory will help to monitor events occurring in deep space, especially in the geostationary, medium-Earth, and high-Earth orbits.
Setting up an observatory in the country itself would mean that India would not have to rely on other countries like USA or China for space explorations and observations.

India has been monitoring space objects using multi-object tracking radars and the SSA observatory will be a huge boost in the sector.