Satellites have been used for many reasons and it has been launched one to many times by different countries all over the world. Nigeria is now one of those countries as it has successfully launched two Earth Observation satellites that they are now using to monitor their region for weathers that have been seasonally ravaging them, most of which are natural disasters. The NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X spacecraft are the ones that were launched and they were aboard a Russian Dnepr rocked where they lofted into orbit from a launch pad in the town of Yasny of souther Russia.
This was all made possible with the collaboration of Nigeria with UK engineers that are on the project and these satellites are being monitored from control stations in Guildford, UK and Abuja in Nigeria. According to President Goodluck Jonathan, the president of Nigeria, this is another milestone to their nation’s effort in solving their national problems with the use of space technology. These satellites have imaging applications of different varieties and they included the ability to monitor areas prone to disaster.
The extreme weather conditions that Nigeria gets is because its territory stretches into Africa’s Sahel, a belt of land on the Sahara Desert’s southern fringe. Aside from the severe droughts the they experience in dry seasons, the Sahel experience devastating rainfall in the wet season which makes it one disaster after another. Most of the 500,000 people nationwide that were displaced in the last year were because of the floods from the Sahel region.
Aside from monitoring the disaster regions near Sahel. It will provide the ability to enhance the food security through monthly crop monitoring, assist with burgeoning urban planning demands and, through the development of engineering skills. This is very much suprising considering the country’s technological capability is lower before this has happened. A benefit that can help them in the near future. They were built Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) in Guildford and they were under contract with the Nigerian National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA). It was 26 Nigerian engineers that worked alongside SSTL engineers in Guildford to build and create the 100kg NigeriaSat-X satellite
