PRESS RELEASE
Russia To Use Space Technology To Monitor Drug Crops
Feb. 17, 2015 (EIRNS)—According to Deputy General Director of Russian Space Systems company Yevgeny Nesterov, RSS has tested spectrozonal photographic technology to help reveal the contrasting areas of land with illegal cultivations all over the world, reports Russia & India Report (RIR) said. Alexei Belyakov, vice president and executive director of the Cluster of Space Technologies and Telecommunications at the Skolkovo Foundation, pointed out that, after receiving the satellite’s photographs, it is important to use drones to obtain a more precise idea of the type and dimension of the drug cultivation.
RSS representative Roman Kirillov, told RIR that RSS Scientific Center plans the space photography, carries it out, collects the data, processes it, and gives the information to its client. The center receives data from both Russian and foreign space remote-sensing space instruments.
"We can identify and determine the cultivations that have appeared in a certain seasonal period," remarked Kirillov. Until recently the monitoring center collaborated mainly within the framework of the Federal Space Program and agreements between the Russian Space Agency and the European Space Agency, as well as space agencies from France, Germany, the U.S., Italy, and other countries.
In the 1990s Lyndon LaRouche had urged the use of satellite and sophisticated aerial photography, using the Landsat satellites to do what the RSS has announced it plans to do. An article in the January-February 1990 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology had pointed out that "the remote sensing techniques developed at NASA’s Earth resources Laboratory to monitor agricultural crops can be used to detect cannabis" and other drug crops.
