Western officials say Rasad-1 could be used to produce high-res maps but move prompts concern over nuclear ambitions

Iran reasserted its ambition to become a power in space on Thursday, claiming it had launched its second satellite into orbit.

Iranian state television said the locally produced Rasad-1 (Observation-1) satellite was launched on Wednesday on a Safir rocket, and went into orbit 260km above the Earth. The report did not reveal what the exact purpose of the satellite was, but western officials said it could be used for reconnaissance or mapping.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has made Iran's space programme one of his government's priorities, announcing that there will be a string of satellite launches before next March. In February, he unveiled a space capsule designed to take a live monkey into space, and the head of the Iranian space agency, Hamid Fazeli, was quoted yesterday as saying that launch would take place this summer. Iran plans to send a man into space by 2020.

British officials said, if confirmed, the Rasad-1 launch represented a violation of a UN security council resolution banning the development of ballistic missile technology ultimately capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. "The same type of technology is involved in launching ballistic missiles," one official said. Iranian reports said the Rasad satellite was built at the Malek Ashtar university, founded by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who are also in charge of the military missile programme. Western officials say that since last October, there have been three previously unpublicised tests of medium-range missiles.

However, western experts said the Safir rocket and the Rasad satellite were much smaller than the powerful multi-stage missiles required to launch a nuclear or conventional warhead.

"Iran could not easily adapt this space launcher for an intercontinental ballistic missile," said Mark Fitzpatrick, a proliferation expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies. "A warhead would be several times heavier than this satellite, which is lighter than the first one they launched. The military significance of this can be easily exaggerated."

The launch comes more than two years after Iran's first venture as a space power, the launch of the Omid (Hope) satellite, which Iran said was for telecommunications purposes.