Article Posted on : - Apr 04, 2011

TEHRAN (BNS): Iran has said it will build a new remote sensing satellite in cooperation with the Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organisation (APSCO) of which it is an active member.

The country's space agency chief Hamid Fazeli said Sunday that Iran plans to have larger share in building the satellite in partnership with APSCO.

“Iranian scientists have always taken part in APSCO meetings. Designing and building a remote-sensing satellite is one of the fields for cooperation,” the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) chief Fazeli was quoted as saying by the Iranian Students’ News Agency.

“We plan to gain a larger share in building the satellite,” the space agency chief said.

China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Mongolia, Peru and Thailand are the other members of APSCO.

Iran, last month, had launched a rocket carrying a test capsule to space.

The Kavoshgar-4 rocket, with the ‘life-capsule’, was originally planned to be launched with a living creature on board.

The rocket, however, was launched without any animal to conduct testing of programming systems and subsystems.

Iran had also launched its first indigenous satellite, Omid, into orbit successfully in 2009.