ISRO’s new satellite mapping service, named Bhuvan, represents its  essence in the whole India on your computer. OnAugust 13, 2009:  The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)  unveiled the beta version of its much-hyped mapping service ‘Bhuvan’ in New Delhi.

What does the Bhuvan do ?
The Bhuvan geoportal enables users to access information on basic natural resources in the geospatial domain initially and particularly the Indian images and thematic information in multiple spatial resolutions. This would provide a sharper picture of Indian terrain barring sensitive locations such as military and nuclear installations also.

Bhuvan displays satellite images of varying resolution of India’s surface and  allowing users to visually see things like cities and important places of interest looking perpendicularly down or at an oblique angle, with different perspectives and can navigate through 3D viewing environment which is like original image. The resolution showcase is based on the points of interest and popularity, but most of the Indian terrain is covered up to at least six metres of resolution with the least spatial resolution being 55 metres from AWifs Sensor.

“Thus, Bhuvan represents, in essence, the whole India on your computer. It enables user to fly from space to street level, to grab, spin and zoom down to any place”

Basic features of Bhuvan:

• Access, explore and visualise 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources etc.
• Visualise multi-resolution, multi-sensor, multi-temporal image data
• Superpose administrative boundaries of choice on images as required
• Visualisation of AWS ( Automatic Weather Stations) data/information in a graphic view and use tabular weather data of user choice
• Fly to locations ( Flies from the current location directly to the selected location)
• Heads-Up Display ( HUD) naviation controls ( Tilt slider, north indicator, opacity, compass ring, zoom slider)
• Navigation using the 3D view Pop-up menu (Fly-in, Fly out, jump in, jump around, view point)
• 3D Fly through (3D view to fly to locations, objects in the terrain, and navigate freely using the mouse or keyboard)
• Drawing 2D objects (Text labels, polylines, polygons, rectangles, 2D arrows, circles, ellipse)
• Drawing 3D Objects (placing of expressive 3D models, 3D polygons, boxes)
• Snapshot creation (copies the 3D view to a floating window and allows to save to a external file)
• Measurement tools (Horizontal distance, aerial distance, vertical distance, measure area)
• Shadow Analysis (it sets the sun position based on the given time creating shadows and effects the lighting on the terrain)
• There would be many more value added functions and facilities which will be added into the package from time to time.
• Particular interest of ISRO/DOS would be to provide such functionalities to common man so that he/she adopts participatory approach with scientists to solve simple problems easily and interactively.

Multi-resolution images from multi-sensor IRS satellites of India is seamlessly depicted through the Bhuvan web portal by enabling a common man to zoom into specific area of interest at high resolution. Bhuvan brings a whole lot of uniqueness in understanding our own natural resources whilst presenting beautiful images and thematic vectors generated from varieties of geospatial information. Bhuvan will also attempt to bring out the importance of multi-temporal data and to highlight the changes taking place to our natural resources, which will serve as a general awareness on our changing planet.  There are lot more special value added services which will be enabled onto the web portal in due course of time and each one of those services are going to be unique to preserving and conserving our precious natural resources through public participation.  We are sure the common man will get rich benefits from these Indian geospatial data services in days to come.

For more info : log on to Bhuvan