At the site of the future main Galileo Security Monitoring Center (GSMC) in Saint Germain en Laye outside Paris, a ground-breaking ceremony was organised by the French Space Agency (CNES), with a large contingent of French civilian and military authorities and EU officials in attendance.

Designed for a wide range of survey applications, the SIRIUS UAV is a fixed wing structure ideal for corridor mapping roads, pipelines and power lines, calculating stockpile volumes, monitoring erosion, reconciliation and progress reporting.

Prior to using the Nikon Nivo total station, leveling was accomplished with a theodolite and precision leveling rod. The theodolite system was very easy to use, but distances could not be measured, and it required manually calculating the height differences and calculation errors and manually entering the values into a computer.

The municipality of Beijing is encouraging investment in the navigation and locationbased services industry, suggesting there is a market worth at least 50 billion yuan ($8 billion) by 2015 after China put its own satellite navigation network into commercial use.

NavCom Technology, Inc has announced a new feature for its GNSS receivers, StarFire Over IP. It allows users to access StarFire corrections over the Internet, giving them access to the same reliable five centimeter globalpositioning accuracy without the need for a base station.

A Soyuz ST-B launcher carrying two Galileo in-orbit validation (IOV) satellites took off as scheduled at 18:15 GMT (20:15 CEST; 2:15 p.m. EDT) on October 12 from the European Spaceport in French Guiana. All the stages of the Soyuz vehicle performed as planned and the Fregat-MT upper stage released the Galileo satellites into their targeted orbit close to 23,200 kilometer altitude, three hours 45 minutes after liftoff.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to launch 58 space missions, including sending spacecraft to moon and Mars, an exclusive satellite to keep a round-the-clock watch on the country and deploy 500 transponders in the next fi ve years. The space agency also aims to deploy its own version of the GPS by putting into orbit a constellation of seven satellites which would form the Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS).

According to Microsoft, some products sold by Google-owned Motorola Mobility infringe on a patent that describes a method of obtaining the map from one database, resource information such as Starbucks locations from a second database, and overlaying the two sets of data.

The latest satellite in China’s Beidou-2 navigation system has been launched in Xichang. The system is expected to start providing positioning and navigation services for China and neighboring areas by the end of this year. And once the system is fully established by 2020, it will play a major role in the country’s economic development and national security.

The new Outback MAX integrated display terminal from Hemisphere GPS offers section and variable rate control, GPS and GLONASS guidance, video support for up to four cameras, plus wireless data transfer capabilities to automatically import and export prescription application maps, as-applied fi les and other critical precision agriculture data.