The Associated Press thought it was an effort to show Iran’s willingness to allow glimpses at sensitive technology even as Tehran and UN inspectors trade accusations about access to nuclear sites and scientists.
The press tour of the Alborz Space Center in Mahdasht, about 40 miles (70 kilometers) west of Tehran, sought to showcase Iran’s advances in aerospace science.
The space center was visited by nearly 50 journalists for international media. Officials said the space center has no military role, and is used to control and collect data from Iran’s satellites.
Iran has placed three satellites in orbit aboard its own rockets. The first, Omid, was launched three years ago and stayed in orbit 85 days. The second, Rasad, was launched last year but stayed aloft a mere 21 days. The government did not admit Rasad had plummeted to earth until after the Iran Times pointed out that NASA’s satellite tracking reports showed it no longer existed.
The third satellite, Navid, was launched one month ago on February 3 and is still aloft.
That would appear not to give the satellite center much to do. But another Iranian satellite, Sina, was launched by a Russian rocket in 2005 and is still in orbit after 6 1/2 years.
The satellite center is on a sprawling tract at the base of hills. Inside are huge satellite dishes and control rooms for monitoring satellites.
“We are the control station for Navid satellite, which has been designed to take pictures from earth orbit,” project director Mojtaba Saradeghi told the visiting journalists, who were shown a model of the Navid satellite. But no pictures taken by Navid have been released.
Saradeghi said sanctions prevented Iran from buying some of the key equipment needed to build Navid, but he said Iranian space experts were able to design and produce the equipment.
“We needed various equipment, including solar panels, for Navid. We could not buy them because of sanctions. So we designed and produced solar panels ourselves,” Saradeghi said.
Kamal Yazdani, another official at the site, said the staff also monitors Terra, a multinational NASA scientific research satellite, and other satellites available to the international scientific community.
“We receive data from these satellites and provide the pictures to research and scientific centers including student projects,” he said.