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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Russia to launch weather satellites, restoring lost capability |
| 2005-05-17 |
| Edited for brevity. Russia has no weather satellites in orbit. The Meteor-M spacecraft is to fill up this substantial gap in the satellite group in 2006, says a report by the Russian Space Agency (Roskosmos). "The completion of the construction, tests and the launch of the Meteor-M weather satellite and a smaller craft Canopus-Vulkan (for detecting man-caused catastrophes and first signs of earthquakes and avalanches) are scheduled for 2006," Roskosmos said. So far, the Russian weather forecasting structures have to use rather expensive information from foreign weather satellites. "We have only one weather satellite in orbit, Meteor-3M-1, which works in other directions but does not provide weather information due to malfunction," a representative of the Russian Hydrometeorolgical Service (Rosgidromet) said. "We use information from American, Japanese and some other land survey craft," he said. |
| Posted by:Dar |