Nigeria in Space – an Impetus for Rapid Mapping of the Country for Sustainable Development Planning

Nigeria being in Space is a deliberate attempt by the government to achieve rapid sustainable socio-economic development, including the development of new resources, understanding of our environment and the maintenance of national security. This resulted in the launch of her 1st Earth Observation satellite (NigeriaSat-1) in September 2003 and opened a window of opportunity to use real-time and easily accessible data from NigeriaSat-1 for socio-economic activities and sustainable national development planning including opportunity to map the country from satellite imageries. The paper highlights some data utilisation applications of NigeriaSat-1 (a 32m spatial resolution imagery); and the enormous impetus the NigeriaSat-2 (2.5m (pan) and 5m (multispectral) to be launched in 2010 will create in large scale mapping for urban development planning. The impact of this is in the current Land Reform effort in the country vis-à-vis the challenges to surveyors for rapid mapping of the whole landmass of Nigeria (924,000 Sq. Km) is examined. Mapping of the whole country is germane to achieving a sustainable national development planning to support the current effort in alleviating poverty and achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Availability and easy access to satellite imagery at relevant spatial resolution serves as catalyst in this respect