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Having launched its first locally made satellite in 2007, Indonesia is now looking to launch another two next year for both communications and remote-sensing applications.

The Lapan-A2 and Lapan-Orari are categorized as microsatellites, weighing 68 and 70 kilograms, respectively, and have been developed in-house by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (Lapan). Both are scheduled to be put into orbit in September 2011 by an Indian rocket.

Toto Marnanto Kadri, head of the Aerospace Electronics Technology Center at the agency, said the satellites were designed, assembled and tested in Indonesia.

“They’re both very small, measuring 45-by-45-by-33 centimeters, so that obviates the need to buy our own satellite launcher,” he said. “Instead, we’ll be piggybacking on India’s launcher from their base in Sriharikota, because they plan to put their own satellite, the Astrosat, into orbit next year.”

He said Lapan’s satellites differed from other remote-sensing satellites in that they would run in an equatorial orbit rather than a polar one.

“It’ll be very interesting, because normally the satellites in current use, such as Landsat [United States] and SPOT [France], are on polar orbits, which means their coverage of Indonesia is relatively low,” Toto said.

“During a 24-hour cycle, a satellite in polar orbit will only pass over Indonesia very briefly, yielding only two to four sets of data.

“However, a satellite in equatorial orbit at a height of 650 kilometers will pass over Indonesia for up to 97 minutes, yielding 14.7 sets of data.”

Passes occurring during daylight hours boost data collection by a factor of five to six, he said.

The Lapan-A2 satellite is equipped with a Kappa PAL color video camera and has a high- ground resolution of 5.96 meters and coverage of 80 kilometers.

“The satellite is unique because it has a digital camera that can monitor areas affected by natural disasters,” Toto said.

The satellite will also carry an Automatic Identification System to tag ships of more than 200 tons, which are required by the International Maritime Organization to have an AIS tracking device.

Toto said the system would be able to pick up the identity, position, speed, destination and specifications of ships in Indonesian waters.

The Lapan-Orari satellite is a joint venture between Lapan and the Indonesian Amateur Radio Organization (Orari), and was designed by a team of 20 from both organizations, said Wisnu Widjaja, deputy secretary general of Orari.

“This is the first-ever amateur radio satellite project in Southeast Asia,” he said.

The satellite is equipped with an amateur radio Automatic Position Reporting System, digital data relay and amateur radio analog voice communication relay.

“Orari has APRS, which can transmit both text and voice communication, and could prove very useful in the event of major natural disasters such as earthquakes in which conventional communications infrastructure may be disabled,” Toto said.

Wisnu said that radio networks that used high frequency to super high frequency channels for transmission were sometimes affected by the weather when used at ground level.

“But that won’t happen in the case of a satellite, therefore we can rely on satellite transmissions for disaster mitigation because they will always work regardless of the weather conditions, not to mention the much wider coverage too,” he said.

However, he did say conventional communications would remain the backbone of the amateur radio system.

“The satellite will serve a complementary function to the existing transmission modes,” he said.

Toto said the Lapan-Orari satellite featured three multiband spectral imaging cameras with 16.7 meters of ground resolution and 101.87 kilometers of coverage, specifications that made it ideal for use in surveys by the forestry and agriculture ministries.

Wisnu added: “The cameras will be very useful for pinpointing the location of forest fires and hot spots, for instance.”