COLOMBO: Sri Lanka would be entering the international space club and also honouring its most famous guest citizen, science visionary the Late Sir Athur Clarke, when it puts research instruments into a British satellite to be named after Clarke and launched in 2010.
Colombo University physicist Dr Chandana Jayaratne told to The New Indian Express here on Thursday, that the satellite would be used to collect data for use by geologists and agricultural scientists.
The British university, which will be building the satellite and the booster rocket would be using materials from decommissioned Soviet Bloc intercontimnental ballistic missiles.
A geostationary comunications satellite is also on the cards to be launched later, and Sri Lanka would be part of this project too, Dr Jayaratne said.
The first satellite would be named after Arthur Clarke, not only because he was the first to foresee and write about communications satellites (in 1945) but also because he chose to live in Sri Lanka for more than five decades till he breathed his last in 2008 at the age of 90.
Dr Jayaratne said that Sri Lankan scientists and technicians had begun work on the project on Thursday, the first anniversary of the death of Sir Arthur, because President Mahinda Rajapaksa was very keen that they should enter the space age and honour the scientist by doing so on his first death anniversay.
The British born Clarke had doggedly continued to stay in Sri Lanka and in Colombo at that, despite the security issues arising from war and terrorism and the turbulent political conditions prevailing in the island country in the last three decades.
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