GIS Development News Update 01st January 2004

Applications

A variety of important news featured in the recent past based on applications.

In the wake of the first US case of 'mad cow disease', the ability to trace contaminated products through the food chain got pronounced. Geospatial techniques walked in, in no time. Global Technology Resources (GTR) introduced a new system combining GPS technology with radio frequency identification (RFID). GTR's system is the first solution of its kind to provide early detection of disease, food borne pathogens and contamination.

In another major achievement for geologists, and after less than a year of work, an Earth-orbiting satellite has churned out the most detailed, 3-dimensional maps ever of the ice sheets blanketing Greenland and Antarctica. The baseline measurements collected by the ICESAT, should allow scientists to track the growth and shrinkage of the ice sheets, and to gauge the effect that might have on global sea levels!!

In another case, a team of scientists from the University of Arizona is developing a computer model to analyze coral reflected-light data. The computer model will help scientists better interpret the raw data gathered by aircraft or satellites. Coral reef health may be accurately estimated from sensors on airplanes and satellites in the future.

After being pulled up by the Delhi High Court for inaction on unauthorized buildings and commercial misuse of residential properties in Rohini and New Friends Colony, Delhi, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has come up with the idea of using satellite maps of Delhi to check such activity. In another part of the world, assessing land values with GIS support made an interesting application. The system is supposed to bring the county into compliance with the Illinois Department of Revenue (US) mandate that all counties to have new maps by 2005 to be used with a new productivity index created by the University of Illinois.

And perhaps the most interesting of these all, is that satellite technology pioneered in New Zealand to track native falcons has been adapted to map the wanderings and diet of elephants on the border of South Africa and Mozambique.

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Business News

Japan aborted the launch of a second pair of spy satellites to monitor North Korea shortly after take-off. The launch of the domestically designed and made H2-A rocket, the workhorse of Japan’s space program, had been delayed three times since Sept. 10 because of technical glitches.

Raytheon Company announced that it has been competitively awarded one of the first Innovations in GeoSpatial Intelligence contracts by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The award is for development of the End-to-End Persistent Surveillance Demonstration and is valued at $141,000.

NovAtel announced that it has been authorized to begin work on a CDN$186,900 contract from Canadian Public Works & Government Services, sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency under the Space Technology Development Program, for the development of a Galileo prototype receiver.

The Department For International Development (DFID), UK has agreed to provide Rs 300 crore as financial assistance to the Andhra Pradesh Energy Efficiency Project (APEEP) in India. The project is aimed at creating centres of excellence at each of the district headquarters by performing survey of distribution network with GPS, consumer indexing and building up of GIS systems. Maps a la carte, Inc., creators of TopoZone, announced that it has entered into a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the USGS to support the USGS' The National Map project.

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Products

The U.S. Air Force launched a new Global Positioning Satellite into orbit aboard a Boeing Co Delta 2 rocket. Lift off happened on Sunday, 21st Dec, at 3:05 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. A delay caused by a faulty fuel sensor nearly pushed the countdown beyond the close of its 15-minute launch window. The $45 million Global Positioning System 2R satellite built by Lockheed Martin will join a constellation of 28 GPS satellites operated by the Air Force. It will replace one of the original GPS satellites launched in 1990.

The Israeli communications satellite Amos 2 was launched into space. The satellite was being launched from Kazakhstan aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Matrox Graphics Inc., the manufacturer of professional graphics solutions, announced the Parhelia PCI 256 MB graphics card. Ideal for PCI environments such as servers, Linux platforms, and PCI workstations, this addition to the award-winning family of Parhelia graphics cards boasts of very high image quality.

With the new LuraWave.jp2 GEO Edition, Algo Vision LuraTech, a developer of compression solutions for digital images and documents as well as JPEG2000 implementations, presented a new version of the JPEG2000 compression tool LuraWave.jp2 that is specially tailored to the requirements of the GIS sector. Developers and users of geo information systems now have access to a program for the compression of aerial and satellite images in the JPEG2000 format. The GEO Edition was developed in close collaboration with the EUSC (European Union Satellite Center), which has integrated the software in its SIGMA Viewer.

Earth Resource Mapping has recently completed a World Geocover Mosaic from Landsat satellite imagery. It is thought to be the world’s largest image served over the Internet, and the largest image of the Earth.

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Miscellaneous

Deferring to Secret Service worries about terrorists, the US government deliberately started blurring its highest-quality aerial photographs over Washington to hide objects in plain view on the roofs of the White House, Capitol and Treasury Department. The government also obscured aerial views of the Naval Observatory compound where Vice President Dick Cheney lives. Looking at this in view of the fact that high-resolution satellite images of Middle East areas are just a credit card away., makes the whole discussion more thought provoking...

Speaking at the 24th convocation of the Anna University, G Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO mentioned that besides Chandrayan-1, ISRO had decided to work jointly with Anna University to develop a micro-satellite named 'ANUSAT', which will be the first ever effort by an Indian university to develop a satellite.

Taiwan's second satellite, ROCSAT-2, was taken to CKS International Airport this month, wrapped in a nitrogen-filled container weighing more than 2 tonnes. The satellite, which left the National Space Program Office (NSPO) in Hsinchu, is expected to be launched on schedule in six weeks from California.

Successful launch of a high-altitude satellite into orbit by China this month put the first ever joint Chinese-European mission onto space. The satellite is said to have been launched using a Long March 2C/SM rocket from Xichang in Sichuan Province.

Another important news was the losing of connection with Beagle 2, the European satellite on Mars probe. It may have been swallowed up by a deep crater as it parachuted down on Mars, scientists disclosed recently. The one-kilometre-wide crater, which could be hundreds of metres deep, lies almost in the middle of the 70 by 10 kilometre landing site near the Martian equator.

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