Landsat program
The availability of Landsat imagery created a lot of interest in the science community. The Hyderabad ground station started receiving Landsat data on a regular basis in 1978. The Landsat program with its design and potentials was certainly a great model and yardstick for the IRS programme. IRS-1A was the first remote sensing mission to provide imagery for various land-based applications, such as agriculture, forestry, geology, and hydrology. The mission's long-term objective was to develop indigenous remote sensing capability.