Mexico City, Sep 1 (IANS/EFE) Mexico’s government said it will begin using a satellite next month to track the country’s agricultural and fishery production on a “permanent and increasingly precise” basis. The satellite is currently in India for its scheduled launch.
The monitoring will be carried out by the Agricultural and Fisheries Information Service, or SIAP, the Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food Secretariat said in a statement Thursday.
It added that SIAP will receive the support of French firm Astrium, which will put a satellite into orbit to process “information on climate, soil, seas and crop location”.
The SPOT 6 satellite is currently situated at India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center in preparation for its scheduled launch in September.
Mexico also will have information delivered from two other satellites – SPOT 4 and SPOT 5 – to the new ground station due to be inaugurated in late September.
The high-resolution satellite imagery also will allow Mexico “to track the impact of climate contingencies and changes to the agricultural frontier, among other activities, to orient Mexican public policy”.
The new system “will guarantee the availability of satellite imagery until 2023”, the secretariat said.
SIAP will channel the data “at no cost to agencies at the three levels of government (federal, state and local) and to public research centers”, the statement added.
–IANS/EFE
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