Wednesday marked the 90th birth anniversary of Vikram Sarabhai, the father of Indian space research programme. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) marked the day with the launch of Bhuvan, the desi version of Google Earth. The application makes use of satellite images taken by ISRO’s Cartosat-1 and Cartosat-2 satellites over a period of one year.
Some aspects of the application are supposedly better than what Google Earth has to offer. Bhuvan can show satellite images at a much better resolution and users may zoom up to six feet from the surface with the least spatial resolution being at 55 feet.
While I am unable to check the finer aspects of the website since the site is currently down, the utility that this application has to offer is definitely interesting. The application is seen to be useful for studying weather patterns, wasteland mapping and more viewer-friendly.
Stressing on the utility, G Madhavan, the chairman of ISRO said, “With Bhuvan, we will be able to produce very local information which will be specific to only our own country. This information available from this mapping system will be useful in addressing very local problems like floods, famines, infrastructure development, education and much more.”
What will be interesting to see now is the government reaction when the next terrorist attack (God forbid) happens. Google has often faced the Indian government’s objections various grounds including Chinese language descriptions for parts of India. It remains to be seen how the ISRO map affects the governments take on online maps.
WoW! This seem to be a great idea. This should help people in India in many ways. I personally feel this is very advantageous.
dont worry no bobody will actualy go that website …its still down …another half hearted pathetic by govt babus
Great idea… Poor execution.
Windows only… IE only… requires login… and admin privileged execution of some closed source program… No way am I touching this thing.
Shouldn’t data collected with tax payer money be made truly freely available to the tax payers? I am sure there is a bunch of open source goodness that could be built around this if only ISRO would open up the data.
This is lame.
Hi Anshul,
I’m afraid we might not be able to check the actual application out until end of this year. However, I would agree that at least the site should be up and running to let us know what’s on offer.
The site seems to be up now, but with the message : “Site is heavily loaded with users. Please bear with us for the delay. View in IE 6.0 or above only.”
Hi Anand,
My point was that I will not be checking this app out because it is essentially defective by design. I spend most of my time on linux and there I wont even be able to access it. And I am not prepared to trust the security of my system over to a closed source plugin written by a government contractor. The least they can do is make the IE plugin open source.
very excellent