A fascinating account of how the earliest imaging systems were built

The typical launch of an Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) rocket has acquired the status of a ritual. The visual, a rocket awesomely piercing the sky and the mission director’s declaration of the success of a mission and paroxysm of ‘national pride,’, is what matters to the average viewer more than the lobbed satellite’s reason for journeying to space.

The unsung heroes of launches are the payloads aboard satellites. While some of them keep Google Maps running and beam the latest Game of Thrones, it is in the ability of others to ‘remote-sense,’ i.e. searching for impending cyclones, raging forest fires, tracking the monsoon and forecasting seasonal crop produce that motivated India, newly independent and dirt-poor in the 1950s, to begin channelling bright scientists, money and real estate towards space technology.

George Joseph, a veteran ISRO scientist, pioneered efforts to develop the cameras and other sensing equipment that are the progenitors of India’s remote-sensing capabilities. His account of this half-a-century journey has resulted in the slim India’s Journey Towards Excellence In Building Earth Observation Cameras. In the last few years a generation of scientists, who were college graduates in the ’60s and early ’70s and began their careers with ISRO, have written personal memoirs of cobbling India’s space programme. These accounts—of ferrying sounding rockets in bullock-carts and bicycles and scouring for space equipment in garage sales in Australia—have usually centred around the challenges in making satellites and the various grades of engines for rockets that enabled progressively-weightier satellites to be launched. Joseph’s contribution is novel in that it goes into great detail—both in the history as well as the technical aspects—of how the earliest imaging systems were built.

We learn, for instance, that the seed of India’s remote sensing programme germinated in mapping coconut wilt-disease in Kerala plantations. Joseph recounts scientist groups conducting helicopter surveys with Hasselblad cameras and being able to observe the early onset of a disease that shrinks the crown of coconut trees. The first imaging systems, launched aboard balloons, convinced Joseph and colleagues that India could build sensors—that circle the earth aboard satellites—which could usefully capture and transmit images of various geographical attributes.

There are interesting anecdotes of ISRO chairman, Satish Dhawan, wagering half his salary on the odds of the first Indian camera, aboard the BHASKARA-1 satellite, successfully beaming pictures. (He parted with ₹5 or half the honorarium that he earned because of dual positions he held at the Indian Institute of Science and ISRO). However, most of Joseph’s narrative is turgid and heavy on technical detail (of the camera configurations) that is unlikely to capture a casual reader.

Joseph also brings to fore the famed work culture of ISRO that’s geared towards the success of missions and—unlike the average hierarchical government office—welcoming of harsh, internal criticism from senior and junior alike. That India’s remote sensing capabilities, which have extended to the Moon and Mars, have exponentially improved and are now being sold to international customers is known, but Joseph’s work doesn’t highlight instances of struggle. Did, for instance, U.S. sanctions in the aftermath of nuclear tests interfere with remote sensing development, like other segments of the space programme? We aren’t told. Also missing are some examples on how government agencies have been able to use satellite data to, say warn of a drought or warn of risks that weren’t discernible from the ground. Valuable as Joseph’s work is in opening-up an under-reported aspect of ISRO’s development, and necessary for India’s historians, it doesn’t succeed in engaging the curious, but non-expert, scientific reader.

India’s Journey Towards Excellence In Building Earth Observation Cameras; George Joseph, Notion Press, ₹450.