With the growing interest in space activities worldwide, very soon India too is set to enter the club of a select few nations which have their own space activity monitoring observatories. The proposed facility will be set up by Digantara, a prominent space sector start-up of India in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand.

The setup will be India's first commercial Space Situational Awareness (SSA) observatory capable of tracking objects as small as 10 cm in size orbiting the earth along with keeping a regular check on space debris and military satellites floating over the region.

Digantara’s Chief Executive Officer, Anirudh Sharma 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. The high-quality observations made will be complemented by observations of its partner ground-based sensor network,” the CEO added.

With the added data at our disposal, the chances of collisions between satellites and other spacecraft will reduce by manifolds as a result of more precise details related to trajectory, location and speed.

Currently, our nation has been relying on multi-object tracking radars and in terms of the SSA, at times India has to seek help from the United States which is an established nation in monitoring space debris as it has observatories in multiple locations across the globe.

To this Sharma explained, “If, for example, Chinese satellites are seen over one particular region of India for a long time, having the indigenous capability to monitor such activities and not being dependent on countries like the US is a plus for India.”

Recently during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, many Russian satellites were seen hovering over the region. Hence, in a similar instance, the SSA will boost India’s abilities to monitor space activity over the subcontinent furnishing a strategic advantage for both military and civilian usage.