A Chinese Long March rocket successfully launched a Turkish remote sensing satellite last month. The 450-kilogram satellite, built by Turkey’s Space Technologies Research Institute and Turkish Aerospace Industries, Inc., with a camera system provided by South Korea, is designed to provide imagery of the Earth at resolutions as high as 2.5 meters. http://www.spacetoday.net/

Fan Changlong, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, required researchers to beef up the security measures of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) and increase its capacity to ward off interference. The BDS began providing services to civilian users in China and surrounding areas in the Asia-Pacifi c region recently. He said the system has broken China’s reliance on foreign navigation systems and carries great signifi cance in safeguarding national security and promoting economic development. www.spacedaily.com.

Nokia has acquired 3D-mapping company Earthmine. Moving quickly, the struggling mobile firm has launched a new free location cloud service called Here, available at the URL Here. net.

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).