Vietnam to operate its first satellite image receiving station

HANOI, June 30 (Xinhua) -- Vietnam's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said the country's first satellite image receiving station will be inaugurated in early July, the Vietnam News Agency reported Tuesday.

The station for the satellite image receiver is located in an outlying district of the capital city Hanoi, said Nguyen Xuan Lam, Director of the ministry's National Remote Sensing Center.

It is built at a cost of nearly 20 million euros (about 28 million U.S. dollars), with fund from France's loans, said Lam.

The station will process images taken by satellite to update land and forest information and locate the burned-down or destroyed forest areas, said the agency.