Bhuvan: ISRO's Online Satellite Imagery Service
CHANDRAYAAN-1 launch is still fresh in our minds and ISRO has one more thing
to cheer about. Bhuvan — Sanskrit for Earth — the application system will
give very high resolution images of India and details of every destination.
Like Google Earth, it will be user-friendly, wherein every surfer will be
able to upload information available to him/her for free use by others.Bhuvan allows you to zoom far closer than the aerial view from a chopper.
IfGoogle Earth shows details upto 200 meters distance and Wikimapia upto 50
meters, Bhuvan will show images upto 10 meters, which means you can easily
see details upto a three floor high building and also add information.
Making the announcement at the inaugural address of the three-day 28th
International Congress on Collaborative Mapping and Space Technology in
Gandhinagar on Tuesday, Isro chairman G Madhavan Nair said, "To meet the
present day requirement of different levels of details, dynamically and with
specific analysis, we need to go for web-based information system. Towards
this, Isro is well on its way to put in place an Indian Remote Sensing
Satellite (IRS) called Bhuvan and an information portal called Bhu-Sampada.
These will not be mere image or information browsers, but the mechanism for
providing the user community satellite images and thematic maps for
developmental planning."
The data gathered through Bhuvan will be provided to different government
agencies for urban planning, traffic management, crop planning, education
and forest planning. The data will be available free to users, but very high
resolution and customised precision data will be given to agencies at a
cost, Madhavan added. "Integrated with application-specific Spatial Decision
Support tools, the application will open up a new era of collaborative
mapping in the country," he said.
The prototype of the application will be ready by November-end and the
application should be uploaded by March. The project has been undertaken in
association with National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad. Bhuvan will be
updated as regularly as once a year as compared to Google Earth which is
four years old now.
# I saw in many blogs/sites that people are thinking that they can view what
their neighbors are doing with the help of Bhuvan :D . Its not like that.
They are just maps of Earth by the superimposition of images obtained by
Satellite Imagery, Aerial Photography, etc..
