IRS P3

IRS P3 [ISRO]

IRS-P3 (Indian Remote Sensing Satellite) was an Indian experimental earth observation satellite.

The satellite was based on the IRS P2 design.

The satellite carried three instruments:

• WiFS (Wide Field Sensor), an ISRO pushbroom imager of IRS-1C and IRS-1D heritage, but extended to 3 channels. It has a resolution of 188 m. The objectives of WiFS observations are to monitor the vegetation index on land and to observe the ocean surface.
• MOS (Multispectral Optoelectronic Scanner), an experimental imaging pushbroom spectrometer for VNIR/SWIR range observations provided by DLR, Berlin. The objective is to monitor the Earth's surface (surface-atmosphere interaction, ocean color, phytoplankton, regional and global distributions of man-made aerosols and their links to gaseous admixtures, spectral and spatial cloudiness characteristics, etc.) in the VNIR/SWIR region of 0.4 - 1.6 µm.
• IXAE (Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment), an ISRO/ISAC and TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India) cooperative experimental astronomy instrument package with the objective to study periodic and aperiodic intensity and spectral variations in X-ray sources.

IRS-P3 was launched on the third flight of the PSLV-G (1) launch vehicle in March 1996. The IRS-P3 spacecraft continued in operations until fall of 2004.