Bangalore: ISRO chief said that next year India’s space group will instigate a special platform to put into space small satellites fulfilling the requirements of rising countries and the domestic technical community.

ISRO chairman, G Madhavan Nair said that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is building up a 100-kg “satellite bus” as demand has picked up for establishing nano-satellites.

“We are trying to look at a small platform which can take up scientific experiments or may even be used for various cluster formations and things like that,” Nair said.

“So from that angle, a 100-kg bus is being developed. We are going to launch it for the first time next year,” Mr. Nair added.

The platform will have an exclusive imaging scheme, which can be used by third world countries.

"With low-cost terminals, they can receive data about their region...that's going to be servicing the needs of various developing countries. We will try to make it available to the (Indian) scientific community. Many science missions in the 11th Plan (2007-12) will go on that,” Nair added.

Nair mentioned that ISRO’s initial satellite many years ago was a nano one that weighs only 40 kg.

“Since the demand was not there (earlier), we did not concentrate on (nano-satellites). Now, many scientists want to come up with small experiments, there is no point in making big satellites for them,” he also said.