ISRO to launch a Google Earth clone service

By Aditya Mhatre at 4 March, 2009, 2:46 am

The India Space Agency, ISRO , will be soon launching Bhuvan, meaning “Earth” in Sanskrti , a service similar to Google Earth. The launch date has not been announced as yet but V. Jayaraman, the Director of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) an ISRO unit in specializes in satellite image processing and distribution, said that the content generation is taking time. In November, the launch date was set for March.

Currently, ISRO will be using images taken at least a year ago by its Cartosat-1 and Cartosat-2 which are remote sensing satellites in orbit around the earth. Apparently these satellites are good enough to shoot images of cars on the street.

How is Bhuvan different from Google Earth

Bhuvan is limited to Indian region and complies to India’s remote sensing data policy. The policy ensure that on-line mapping service don’t show location of military and nuclear installations.

Bhuvan APIs?

Many experts in the field of geology and mapping organizations are glad that an Indian organization is able to show off its skills in this area. However it remains to be seen if ISRO would make APIs available to that people could build custom application around this and overlay their data on top of what ISRO has.

This seems to be encouraging news to Indian mapping organization like MapMyIndia.com and it will be interesting to see how open is ISRO to sharing this data.

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