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2007 has witnessed the long awaited launch of two highly coveted missions - recently the RADARSAT-2, Canada’s next–generation commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite has been successfully launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 14th December at 05:17 Pacific Standard Time on a Soyuz launch vehicle, and earlier on 15th June this year we witnessed the launch of TerraSAR-X the radar imaging satellite from the ESA.
RADARSAT-2 offers new capabilities including: a finer resolution of upto 3m, flexibility in selection of polarization and left-and right-looking imaging. These capabilities, in concert with increased on-time imaging capacity, and an enhanced ground segment with a data delivery time as short as 4 hrs in emergency conditions, will allow MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd (MDA) to offer clients an even greater degree of flexibility in choice of products and service offerings.
'All weather' imaging of our planet has never been better...
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Until recently there was no resource in the Internet whatsoever, enabling to carry out a search for images through several VHR RS programs simultaneously. Each company-operator offers its own solution in terms of data selection for the ROI, thus causing some discomfort to the end-user.
Taking a possible hint from popular airline e-tickiting websites, for the first time a universal tool to search for IKONOS, QuickBird and EROS-?, high resolution data became accessible on the ScanEx’s web-site in Russian «Kosmosnomki». A user-friendly interface, setting multiple search parameters (imagery date, seasons, clouds), possibility to view QuickLooks of the found images over the vector map or raster mosaics layer make the VHR data selection simple and easy. The search for images is based on the “best coverage” criteria allowing the customer to save time and to find among single-layer satellite coverage the images selected based on the best quality criteria – most updated and cloud-free images... only hitch - for the present it's only available in Russian.
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With a suite of baseline payloads, identified to meet the scientific objective of collecting the mineralogical data from the Lunar surface, including a Terrain MappingCamera (TMC), a Hyper-Spectral Imager (HySI), a Low Energy X-ray Spectrometer (LEX), a High En-ergy X-? ray Spectrometer (HEX) and a Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI), the Chandrayaan-1 is scheduled for launch on 4th September 2008. These payloads will provide simultaneous mineralogical, chemical and photo-geological mapping of the lunar surface at resolutions better than previous and currently planned lunar missions. They will allow (i) direct estimation of lunar surface concentration of the elements Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti and Fe with high spatial resolution (=20 km), (ii) High resolution (100m) UV-VIS-NIR mapping of the lunar surface to identify abundances of various lunar minerals, (iii) High resolution 3D mapping of the lunar surface, and (iv) nature of volatile transport on moon, particularly to colder lunar polar regions.
India's first unmanned mission to the moon will be a remote sensing mission with an objective to do the chemical and mineral mapping. "Chandrayaan-1 is basically a remote sensing mission doing a chemical and mineral mapping while Chandrayaan-2 will be a lander and rover mission," said M Annadurai, Chandrayaan Project Director.
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Image of the Week |
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Nalanda: The ancient seat of learning
For additional information Click here
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Audiocast |
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News Cast
By Hrishikesh
Samant
This News Cast is 19.00 minutes long and contains news
and discussions on the happenings in the geospatial domain.
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Interview |
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Challenge for the industry is brainware!
Prof. Dr. Fraser Taylor
Distinguished Research Professor
Faculty of Geography and Environment on the new paradigm of ‘Cyber Cartography’
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Dr.
Hrishikesh Samant