Bangalore: India's space agency will launch a cluster of 10 satellites onboard a polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C9) from the Satish Dhawan space centre at Sriharikota, about 90 km from Chennai.

The 230-tonne PSLV will carry the latest version of remote sensing satellite Cartosat-2A, an 83kg indigenous mini satellite and eight foreign nano-satellites into polar orbit.

?The launch, which will be PSLV's 13th flight, is scheduled at 9:20 a.m. Monday (April 28) and will be the third flight with core-alone configuration where the rocket will not have booster-straps,? an official at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) said here Thursday.

The 690 kg Cartosat-2A will have a state-of-the-art Panchromatic camera for shooting black-and-white pictures in the visible region of electromagnetic spectrum. The imagery will have a spatial resolution of one metre. The camera covers a swath (geographical strip of land) of about 9.6 km.

?The agile remote sensing spacecraft is steerable along and across the direction of its movement to facilitate imaging of any area more frequently. With Cartosat-2, which was launched January 2007, the latest version will form a pair to provide frequent re-visits,? the official noted.

The space agency-built mini satellite (IMS-1) carries two optical payloads - a multi-spectral (Mx) camera and a hyper-spectral (HySI) camera. Both the payloads operate in the visible and near infrared regions of the electro-magnetic spectrum. The resolution of Mx is 37 metre with a swath of 151 km and that of HySI is 506 metre with a swath of 130 km.