From the Times in London
Rhys Blakely in Bombay
Emboldened by its first mission to the Moon, India is to take on a target closer to Earth: Google.
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which is based in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of the sub-continent, will roll-out a rival to Google Earth, the hugely popular online satellite imagery service, by the end of the month.
The project, dubbed Bhuvan (Sanskrit for Earth), will allow users to zoom into areas as small as 10 metres wide, compared to the 200 metre wide zoom limit on Google Earth.
It comes as India redoubles its efforts to reap profits from its 45-year-old space programme, long criticised as a drain on a country where 700 million people live on $2 (£1) a day or less. It also follows in the slipstream of the country's first Moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, which reached the lunar surface successfully on Friday.
Bhuvan will use a network of satellites to create a high-resolution, bird's-eye view of India – and later, possibly, the rest of the world – that will be accessible at no cost online and will compete with Google Earth. If a pilot version passes muster, Bhuvan will be fully operational by the spring. There are also plans to incorporate a global positioning system (GPS) into the online tool.
The data gleaned by the state-sponsored project will be available to the Indian Civil Service to help with urban planning, traffic management and water and crop monitoring. G Madhavan Nair, the Isro chairman, said: "This will not be a mere browser, but the mechanism for providing satellite images and thematic maps for developmental planning."
There could also be commercial spin-offs. Experts say that Google Earth is being built as a platform for advertising that could be worth billions, and that Bhuvan will also address one of the issues taxing the web's biggest companies: how to engage users amid the mass of digital detritus that has accumulated on the internet.
Alex Burmaster, of Nielsen, the web analysts, said: "The amount of time that people spend online is reaching a plateau and websites are battling furiously for attention. Anything that relates to where a person is, saves a user time, and makes the web more relevant — especially geographically — is big news."
Isro officials say Bhuvan will provide images of far greater resolution than are currently available online — particularly of the sub-continent, a region where large areas remain virtually unmapped.
There are plans to charge fees for the most detailed information.
The agency intends to refresh its images every year — a feature that would give it an edge over its biggest rival and help keep track of the frenetic pace at which Indian cities are growing. A recent report by Gartner, the technology analysts, gave warning of the risk of relying on the "outdated information" used by Google Earth, which is now four years old and has been downloaded some 400 million times.
About 2.5 million people used Google Earth in Britain last month, according to Neilsen, making it the web's seventh most popular application behind tools such as Apple's iTunes (fourth with 5.7 million users) and Windows Live Messenger (first with 14.8 million).
Indian scientists will be mindful, however, that theirs is not the first country to take on the might of Google. In 2005, a French plan to create a Eurocentric search engine to defend against the "Anglo-American domination of the net", part of a €2 billion (£1.7 billion) raft of technological grand projets, fizzled without trace. Undeterred, a year later France unveiled Géoportail, its own answer to Google Earth.
At the time, Jacques Chirac, then the President of France, said: "We're engaged in a global competition for technological supremacy . . . It's time to go on the offensive." Bloggers quickly labelled the venture "another mind-numbingly stupid boondoggle".
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Joining the US, the erstwhile Soviet Union and the European Union, the 35-kg Moon Impact Probe (MIP) hit the moon exactly at 8.31 PM, about 25 minutes after the probe instrument descended from the satellite in what ISRO described as a "perfect operation".
"It will signify the entry of India on Moon," an Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) official said.
The MIP is one of the 11 scientific instruments (payloads) onboard Chandrayaan-1, India's first unmanned spacecraft mission to Moon launched on October 22 from Sriharikota spaceport.
The probe will help qualify some of the technologies related to future soft landing missions. This apart, scientific exploration of the moon at close distance is also intended using MIP. PTI
Congratulations to ISRO
Images courtesy Wikipedia
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The Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation reports that the Government of India has approved the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and Indian Space Reseach Organisation's (ISRO) proposal for the implementation of the GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) project for seamless navigation over Indian airspace at an estimated cost of INR 7.74 Billion.
Ex-post facto approval has also been given to the amount of INR 1.48 Billion already spent in the first phase of the project. With GAGAN, India will be only the fourth country in the world to have a satellite based navigation system.
The management of airspace, a sovereign function, has been assigned to the AAI. The AAI presently uses ground based terrestrial navigation system for providing safe navigation over the Indian airspace. The ground based system has site limitations and range problems.
To overcome the limitations of ground based navigation systems, in 1993, the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) endorsed use of a Global Satellite Navigation System as a future Air Navigation System for Aviation. Following this, the AAI and ISRO entered into an MoU in 2001 for the implementation of the GAGAN project for seamless navigation over Indian airspace.
The United States has put in place a Global Positioning System (GPS) using 29 satellites at an altitude of 20,000 km orbit. However, the position accuracies required for precision approach and landing, for Civil Aviation, cannot be met by the core GPS constellation, due to the uncertainties in the position accuracies caused by Ionospheric delays, satellite ephemeris and clock errors. The constellation needs to be augmented to provide higher accuracy, reliability and integrity, with the help of a Space Based Augmentation System (SBAS).
In order to provide enhanced accuracies with integrity, reliability and continuity, it is essential to have an augmentation system capable of collecting data in two frequencies over the service area, separate these errors at the master control centre and communicate and correct message to the aviation user in the frequency as that of the core GPS.
To achieve this, an SBAS consisting of a geo-stationary space segment for the core constellation, a ground segment consisting of reference stations, the master control centre and an uplink earth station are required. The reference stations collect dual frequency data, which is communicated to the master control centre. At the master control centre, the errors are separated and the corrected navigation message is sent to the navigation transponder on board the geo stationary satellite, which translates it to the user GPS civil frequency. The GAGAN system proposes to augment the GPS data with the help of a geo stationary satellite to be launched by ISRO and the ground based infrastructure of reference stations, uplink earth stations and master control center created by the AAI.
The implementation of the GAGAN programme is being realized in two phases:
- GAGAN TDS phase (Technology Demonstration System) - to develop and demonstrate the technological capability. This phase was successfully tested and completed in August 2007.
- GAGAN FOP (Final Operation Phase) – to be implemented for operational use and to be certified by DGCA. This phase is expected to be completed by May 2011.
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