23rd July 1972 – ERTS-1 or what was later re-christened as Landsat 1 was launched, and in the words of Dr. McKelvey, then director of USGS 'The ERTS spacecraft represents the first step in merging space and remote-sensing technologies into a system for inventorying and managing the Earth's resources'. The Landsat program is thirty five years old and has survived the ravages of time and political ideologies. The global Landsat data users community had its say in convincing the decision makers about the need for this 'mission' to continue. Veteran users of Landsat data will still have in their collection the 9” diazo positives and memories of backbreaking hours spend on mechanically registering the 70mm positives on the Addcol viewer – the then coveted instrument for generating FCC's. Today, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) draft 'Mission Operations Element Requirements Document' has just been released for review and comment, and old faithful Landsat 5 along with Landsat 7 will be maintained till 2012...cheers. They will soon be joined by Landsat 8.

The TerraSAR-X has finally been integrated with the rocket adapter. Scheduled for launch from Baikonur on the 15th of June, this long awaited radar imaging satellite from Germany had its launch postponed a number of times due to technical problems with the launch vehicle. With the launch of Radarsat 1 by Canada in 1995, the acquired data using seven beam modes with different polarisations and resolutions has been put to use in more diverse applications than conventional passive remotely sensed data. The TerraSAR-X has incorporated payloads designed after the experience gained from SAR including the SRTM. The Ground Moving Target Indication (GMTI) from TerraSAR-X will be used to generate traffic information for civilian use. With an expected resolution of 1m, precise SAR focussing of moving objects or targets is still not a cakewalk.

In our world of polylines and arcs, we are used to jagged, angular or even faceted curves and have accepted them as part of the game. Our attempts at smoothing curves is either by digitising a large number of points on a curve – resulting in inflated file sizes, or by line generalisation algorithms which replace small line segments by longer line segments but degrades the accuracy of the map. FME in collaboration with TCI has just released the Curvefitter Transformer. The Curvefitter smooths curves by replacing the small line segments with an optimal combination of arc segments and straight lines, where the user controls the tolerances for file size reduction, line smoothness and accuracy – so no more sharp turns, just elegant curves...