Under the watchful eye of ESA’s Vecmap initiative, the Asian bush mosquito is about to get bitten in Belgium. First observed in Belgium in 2002, the Asian bush mosquito can spread viruses such as Chikungunya, Dengue, and West Nile. Vecmap tests the accurate mapping of mosquitoes in Europe and in particular, mosquitoes carrying diseases.

The next Galileo navigation satellite has touched down at Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, to begin preparations for its launch in October. These third and fourth Galileo ‘In-Orbit Validation’ (IOV) satellites are due to be launched aboard a Soyuz ST-B vehicle in October. These new satellites will join the first two Galileo satellites – launched last year – in medium-Earth orbit at 23 222 km.

Dismayed over “negligible” returns from sale of satellite imagery, a Parliamentary panel has asked the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), India to be more competitive in data marketing. The Public Accounts Committee, in a draft report on activities of the NRSC, appeared to brush aside Department of Space (DoS) contention that remote sensing was treated as a “public good service” rather than commercial activity

Northern Constabulary are urging hill walkers not to rely solely on ‘smartphone’ apps for navigation. On two occasions in recently, both Police and Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team have been involved in the rescue of lost walkers who were relying entirely on apps which proved to be insufficient on their own.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Robust Robotics Group has developed a plane that can navigate itself without GPS. For decades, researchers have been working on creating helicopters that can pilot themselves without human guidance.

The key issue in the region is harmonization, which is not just a regional issue but rather a global matter. Within the region, different countries are at different stages of development, from Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems to procedures and airspace designs—some are quite advanced while others are just getting started.

Considering the transformational rate of growth in passenger traffic, airline fleet and the aircraft movements anticipated in the next few decades, the challenges that confront aviation are the need for matching airport/CNS-ATM infrastructure, airport/airspace capacity enhancement and technology up gradation.

The primary objective of ISAC is to build satellites to meet national requirement of the country in various application areas like satellite-based communication, navigation, national natural resources management, oceanography, meteorology, cartography and exploration of outer space and other planets, etc.

Aspirations to actions
Brakes to breakthroughs
Confusions to confidence
Delays to deliverables

Two Radarsat-2 images acquired in fine quad-polarized mode were chosen for this study. The images were collected in leaf-on and leaf-off seasons. The experimental results demonstrated that the neighboring information provides valuable information for the classification of Polarimetric SAR data. The classification results showed that the proposed methodimproves classification accuracy significantly over the baseline methods.