Nigeria to launch two satellites on July 7 - NASRDA

		Friday, June 24, 2011
		Everest Amaefule  Nigeria will launch two earth observation satellites into the orbit on July 7, the Director-General, National Space Research and Development Agency, Dr. Seidu Mohammed, has said.
		Mohammed made the announcement at a special press conference on the new satellites in Abuja on Thursday. While one of the satellites, NigeriaSat-2, was constructed by the Surrey Satellite Technologies Limited, the other, NigeriaSat-X, is an experimental satellite constructed by Nigerian engineers, using the facilities of SSTL. Both satellites will be launched in Yasney, Russia, by Dnepr, a satellite launch services provider. Five other satellites will be launched aboard the same launch vehicle as the Nigerian satellites. They are RASAT for Turkey, EDUSAT for Italy, ARSAT-5 & 6 for the United States and Sich-2 for Ukraine. According to the NARSDA boss, Nigeria's journey into space is not for showmanship but to realise space-based solutions for the myriads of problems being encountered in the nation. He said, "The two spacecraft, Nigeria-2 and Nigeria-X, and their launch vehicles, have been adequately insured in line with the global practice and all is set for the launch of these two spacecraft. NigeriaSat-2 is a high resolution satellite with 2.5 metres GSD in the panchromatic channel and it is an improvement on NigeriaSat-1, which had a resolution of 32m. "NigeiraSat-X is the ingenuity of our engineers, who have undergone training in the design and building of satellites. NigeriaSat-X depicts Nigeria's first efforts at developing satellites and will be launched alongside NigeriaSat-2." The contract for the construction of NigeriaSat-2 was awarded to SSTL in 2006 at a cost of £34m. Another 18 per cent of the cost was spent on the insurance of the spacecraft. The launching will bring to four the number of satellites that the country has taken in to the orbit since the first, an earth observation satellite, known as NigeriaSat-1, was put in the orbit on September 27, 2003. The second satellite put in the orbit by Nigeria is the Nigeria Communications Satellite known as NigComSat-1.      odili.net/news/source/2011/jun/24/824.html