Military Wants New Satellite to aid Operations as Science Minister Assures of Nigerian in Space by 2030

The Nigerian military through the Defence Space Agency on Thursday at a meeting with the minister of science and technology, Dr Ogbonnaya Onu, made a request that Nigeria’s next satellite be equipped with adequate military capacities.

Minister for Science and Technology, Ogbonnaya Onu; credit: pulse,ng

Onu also assured the management team of the Defence Space Agency led by its director-general, Air Vice Marshal Victor Udoh, that the federal government was committed to implementing Nigeria’s space policy.

One of the components of the space policy is the training of a Nigerian astronaut to travel to outer space which the minister assured his guests would be accomplished before or by 2030.

“The space programme is very important for a country like Nigeria. The ministry will work very hard in the years ahead to strengthen all the structures of the agencies that will help us to ensure that the nation plays a role in the space’’, Onu said.

Earlier, AVM Udoh stated that the defence space agency needed the support of the science ministry in order to be more efficient and effective. He also lamented that no provision was made for the military in the design, construction and launching of Nigeria’s most recent earth observation satellite known as NigeriaSat-2.

Udoh said, “We are supposed to leverage on the satellite to give us intelligence from  space but we couldn’t take advantage of all we needed in the satellite.  As at the time it was launched five years ago, we are not where we are now. The payloads did not carry all the things required by the military.
“Fortunately, the satellite is getting to the end of its lifetime. It is now time to start planning for the replacement of the satellite.”

Explaining the requirement for military operations, Udoh said the military needs syntactic aperture camera that can penetrate the cloud so that it can see images on ground.

In 2014, when terrorist group, Boko Haram abducted over 200 girls from Chibok Secondary School, many wondered why Nigeria’s satellites could not be used to track the insurgents. The director-general of the National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) thereafter explained that Nigeria’s satellites were not equipped to provide such real-time updates that could be used to track the insurgents.

Meanwhile, the Defence Headquarters on Thursday stated that the Nigerian Armed Forces will continue with its operations against Boko Haram regardless of the purported remorse demonstrated by the sect leader, Abubakar Shekau, in a new video posted online.

The statement signed by the director of defence Information, Rabe Abubakar, also advised the public to discountenance the online video clip.

source: punch