ISRO Bhuvan - Indian made satellite mapping tool

Bhuvan is a satellite mapping tool similar to Google Earth and Wikimapia. It was developed by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It offers resolution up to 5 metres and is considered as a rival to Google Earth and Wikimapia.

The tool would offer pictures of the globe, just like Google Earth, and navigable in the same way but currently has the best resolutions over the Indian sub-continent. It allows users to fly from space to street level, grab, spin and zoom down to any place.

It also provides tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing and visualizing thematic information. The resolutions currently on offer are good enough to view a vehicle moving on a road quite clearly.

Bhuvan currently only offers images taken between one and three years ago even over India. It combines satellite imagery from various sensors onboard IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) satellites and transposes them on a 3-D globe. As it keeps updating its database with more recent and higher resolution images, Bhuvan eventually promises to offer real-time data and images.

Incidentally, Indian authorities have had some problems in the past with Google Earth’s depiction of certain parts of the country. Recently, Google Earth admitted that it had mistakenly shown some areas in Arunachal Pradesh as part of Chinese territory and promised to correct the maps soon. The Indian government had earlier pulled up Google Earth for showing some sensitive and strategic defence locations on its maps.

Keeping in mind that its users will be mostly in India to begin with, Bhuvan is designed to be as “bandwidth-friendly” as possible and can run even on slow internet connections. However, as of now, it does not allow users to add their own data, like photographs or text, on to the images.

The beta version was released by Minister of State for Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan at a function organised by the Astronautical Society of India.

ISRO promises to add many more value-added functions and facilities including interactive systems to make it more user-friendly and effective information portal.

After the success of its moon mission, ISRO has set its sights on Mars. Today, it announced plans of sending a orbiter mission to Mars sometime after 2013.

ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair told reporters that feasibility studies for Mars mission had been completed and the scientific team was now evaluating the mission objectives and scientific proposals. He said the government had already sanctioned an initial amount of Rs 10 crore for the project.

Bhuvan Features:

* Visualise 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources etc.

* Fly to locations ( Flies from the current location directly to the selected location)

* Heads-Up Display ( HUD) naviation controls ( Tilt slider, north indicator, opacity, compass ring, zoom slider)

* Navigation using the 3D view Pop-up menu (Fly-in, Fly out, jump in, jump around, view point)

* 3D Fly through (3D view to fly to locations, objects in the terrain, and navigate freely using the mouse or keyboard)

* Drawing 2D objects (Text labels, polylines, polygons, rectangles, 2D arrows, circles, ellipse)

* Drawing 3D Objects (placing of expressive 3D models, 3D polygons, boxes)

* Snapshot creation (copies the 3D view to a floating window and allows to save to a external file)

* Measurement tools (Horizontal distance, aerial distance, vertical distance, measure area)

* Shadow Analysis (it sets the sun position based on the given time creating shadows and effects the lighting on the terrain)

How to start with BHUVAN:

To install the plugin, you need to have the administrator privilege in your machine.

The product works only in IE and is quite buggy to start with.

• Click here to register

• Click here to download the Bhuvan plugin(TerraExplorer plugin)

• after installing the plugin you will have a desktop shortcut of TerraExplorer plugin, you dont have to run that.

• click here and login by providing your user id and password (after login the Bhuvan page will appear)
• Now take a DESI look.

for further info mail me chandansarkar.85@gmail.com

Screenshots: