The National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA) says it will deploy advanced computation facilities for better imagery and commercialisation of its projects.
Its Director-General, Dr Matthew Adepoju, who said this on Sunday in an interview in Abuja, said that the agency was timeworn to conduct national and regional projects.
The appointment of Adepoju by President Bola Tinubu on May 25 was recently confirmed by the Senate.
The D-G said that NASRDA had over the years engaged in piloting projects, which barely attained the commercialisation and industrialisation stage.
“It is quite disheartening that when we want to process imageries because satellite imageries are very heavy, it takes a lot of computer processing capacity to do so.
“Most of our equipment currently are just work stations, but we need more advanced computation facility to be able to take on regional and national projects.
“Most of the work we are doing, we are only able to do pilot programmes and we have been doing pilots for too long.
“The agency has come of age that we should be able to run a national project from our laboratory,” he said.
According to him, that is one of my top priorities and appeal that I made to the Senate, that this agency is the brainbox, the hub of so many activities.
The D-G said that the country faced some problems, ranging from insecurity, environmental issues, disaster, and food security, the solution resides with space technology.
He said that the agency had rolled out projects to bridge the gap in the agricultural and environmental sectors, adding that it aimed at getting them to industrialisation.
Adepoju said, “Nigeria engaging in space programme is a necessity because all the solutions to our terrestrial problems are better from space.
“When you see a farmer in some developed countries doing better than the farmer in Nigeria or Africa, is because there is technology that they have put into their production value chain.
“Part of the things I intend to achieve is to mainstream the private sector into the space sector, move our Research and Development (R&D) from incomplete metamorphosis to complete metamorphosis.
“We do R&D, but they don’t find expression into industrialisation and commercialisation,”he said.
Adepoju said that NASRDA was going to nationalise some of its programmes like Crop-Watch, NASA harvest, cashew plantation mapping, soil suitability, and mapping ungoverned areas, which were done at a small scale and state levels.
He said that the 2.7 million Euros recently acquired from the European Commission would also enable the agency to strengthen its climate-smart agriculture value chain.
“We are going to train our officers, train some officers in Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, Ministry of Environment.
“We will have a hub for big data analytics, engage in Artificial Intelligence technology to do more work, develop the infrastructure to be able to undertake national and regional projects.”
He said that deploying space, science and technology was a necessity because it was the peak of human endeavour in innovation, engineering and science.
NAN
