According to the head of the state corporation, this kind of information is of great value - it is needed to assess possible damage and understand the events that have occurred
MOSCOW, November 17. /tass/. Roscosmos has prepared photos of the port of Beirut from space, despite the fact that it has not received an official request. This was announced by the general director of the state corporation Dmitry Rogozin before signing a memorandum of cooperation between TASS and Roscosmos, implying the creation of an agency office on the International Space Station.
"Today I signed a paper with a fairly detailed survey at the request of the Lebanese leadership about the situation in Beirut regarding the explosions that occurred there. It applied through an agency. The request itself did not come to us at Roscosmos, but we conducted a detailed [analysis] what the port was like before the explosion from the archive and immediately after," Rogozin said.
He noted that this kind of information is of great value - it is needed to assess possible damage and understand the events that have occurred. "There is no alternative to this kind of shooting," he stressed.
Roscosmos recalled that photos of the consequences of the explosion from the Canopus-V satellite were published in open sources on August 5, 2020. In turn, a source in the rocket and space industry told TASS that Dmitry Rogozin instructed to prepare the relevant materials.
Earlier, the office of the President of Lebanon reported that the country's president Michel Aoun officially requested from Russia satellite photos taken on the day of the explosion that occurred in the port of the Lebanese capital in August 2020.
On August 4, 2020, an explosion occurred in the seaport of Beirut, the capacity of which was 1,500 tons in TNT equivalent. The blast wave destroyed and damaged thousands of houses in the city and beyond, killed 219 people, injured 6.5 thousand, more than 300 thousand citizens were left homeless. According to the Lebanese Interior Ministry, the cause of the explosion was the ignition of over 2.7 thousand tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse during welding operations.
