The Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF), Government of India, has approved National Forestry Information Network and IT for fire monitoring under an action plan to enhance forestry science. The National Forestry Information Network would be established using remote sensing, GIS and MIS. All land based forestry interventions will be geo-mapped and monitored on a …

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman K. Radhakrishnan said the flight- testing of the indigenous cryogenic stage of the Geo Stationary Launch Vehicle (GSLV) D3 would be conducted in April. The vehicle would carry GAST-4, a communication satellite. “Though we had several GSLV flights, we were using the Russian cryogenic stages,” he said. As far …

Pictometry International Corp. announced that it has captured more than 45,000 high resolution aerial oblique images of earthquake damage in Haiti and has donated access to the imagery via Pictometry Online™ to URISA’s GISCorps volunteers. Pictometry captured the Haiti images after the January earthquake and within days the imagery was processed in Rochester and deployed …

RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems announced serial production and availability of the VMX-250 Mobile Scanning System. The VMX-250 System consists of two RIEGL VQ-250 ‘Full Circle’-Laser Scanners, which combined can achieve 600,000 measurements per second, enabling an extremely fast, efficient and highly accurate 3D mapping of highways, streets, railroads, and the like. The system configuration further …

Taiwan’s National Space Organization (NSPO) says it is planning to launch the satellite FORMOSAT-5 in 2013. The satellite will carry a high-resolution optical remote sensing instrument for earth sensing and earth observation. The instrument was designed, manufactured and packaged in Taiwan. FORMOSAT-5 is Taiwan’s first remote sensing program. The project is part of Taiwan’s plan …

Galileo Application Days, 3-5 March, kicks off the competition with a conference and an ‘Application Village’, where demonstrations will occur. The annual ESNC competition, or ‘Galileo Masters’ as it is also known, is designed to stimulate commercial applications using Europe’s satellite navigation programmes. The event is being organised by the GSA, and the Application Centre …

The Director of the Galileo Programme and Navigation related activities, Mr René  Oosterlinck, and the CEO of OHB-System AG, Berry Smutny, signed the contract for the development and construction of 14 Galileo satellites. These signatures implement the decision made by the European Commission to nominate OHB-System as prime contractor for the 1st 14 satellites.
With a …

Jean-Yves Le Gall, Chairman and CEO of Arianespace, and René Oosterlinck, Director of the Galileo Program and Navigation-related Activities at the ESA, signed the launch contract for the first ten FOC (Full Operational Capability) satellites in Europe’s planned Galileo satellite positioning system at ESTEC (European Space Research & Technology Centre) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The …

BlueSky Positioning and EMT announced that EMT has completed its initial field testing of BlueSky Positioning’s A-GPS (Assisted-Global Positioning System) technology. The tests were conducted using both GPRS and USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Services Data) for retrieving assistance data in a live 3G network. EMT Estonia is the first network operator to test a USSD connection …

Appello Systems introduced Maploader – a service which enables the user to pre-load high quality maps to the mobile phone and always have them available, regardless of connectivity. Wisepilot Maploader enables end-users to pre-load high quality maps directly to their mobile phone in batches of country by country. Wisepilot Maploader will offer pre-loading of maps …