Indian Space Research Organisation chairman G Madhavan Nair on Tuesday said that there is no satellite in the world that can predict a tsunami. Similarly, there are no scientific tools to predict an earthquake either.

But satellites can provide images capturing the trail of disaster caused by a tsunami for assessment and fast tracking relief operations.

"We have positioned our remote sensing satellites on the entire affected region and are constantly updating the Crisis Management Group [based in Delhi] with images," Nair told PTI in Bangalore on Tuesday.

• Graph: How quake in Indonesia affected India

Images processed at the National Remote Sensing Agency in Hyderabad would also be distributed to the Union home ministry to help coordinate relief and rescue operations with the state governments.

India has three remote sensing satellites - IRS 1-C, 1-D and Resourcesat-1 and a meteorological satellite Kalpana-1 that assess climatic change.

Incidentally, all three satellites were not over the Indian Ocean on Sunday morning when the tsunami hit the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the southern Indian coast.

• What is a tsunami?
  

But ISRO immediately positioned the 5.6 metre high-resolution cameras of Resourcesat and the panchromatic cameras of the IRS satellites to map the disaster, which claimed thousands of lives and destroyed villages along the coast.

• How you can help