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The EO Portal reports the successful launch of the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) satellite. From the Press Release: "he launch vehicle flew smoothly, and, at 16 minutes and 30 seconds after liftoff, the Daichi separation was confirmed. The Perth first mobile station in Australia started receiving signals from the ALOS at 10:52 a.m. (JST), and by those signals, JAXA confirmed that the solar array paddle deployment was successfully completed." The EO Portal informs us: "The ALOS satellite will be carrying two high-resolution optical (AVNIR-2 and PRISM) and one L-band fully polarimetric SAR instruments (PALSAR)."

The EOPortal links to the first PRISM sensor data from the recently launched ALOS satellite. From the ALOS website: "The ALOS has three remote-sensing instruments: the Panchromatic Remote-sensing Instrument for Stereo Mapping (PRISM) for digital elevation mapping, the Advanced Visible and Near Infrared Radiometer type 2 (AVNIR-2) for precise land coverage observation, and the Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) for day-and-night and all-weather land observation." I copied below Jonathan's Space Report on ALOS.

From the All Points Blog summary : "The "Daichi" satellite went up about two years ago. Japan launched it to collect data to create maps of remote parts of the country. Today, the Geographical Survey Institute said that the images were blurry and could not be used for the detailed mapping planned. But the images won't go to waste - they'll be used as background data for land use determination and the like."

For a link to the official store, visit the All Points Blog website.

Early last month the Bull's Ramble blog informs us South Africa now gets 10-m satellite imagery in NASA World Wind [several screenshots]. From the blog: "The data is from SPOT 5 provided by SpotImage and collected in 2005, it is currently only 10m resolution but looks gorgeous [...]" See also related stories below. Related to NWW, we also learn JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is using NWW to visualize data of their latest lunar explorer KAGUYA, making me wonder about the developments to their GLOBALBASE project. Update: 02/05 17:01 GMT by S : Here's a project called Africa@Home, which, similarly to SETI@Home, harness the crunching power of home computers: "The first application being developed for AFRICA@home is called MalariaControl.net. This application models the way malaria spreads in Africa and the potential impact that new anti-malarial drugs may have on the region." (via Kelly Lab blog)