Slashgeo

GIS Development links to a Central Chronicle article about the Indian Space Research Organisation planning to launch 10-12 satellites in the coming four years. From the article: "[...] the satellites which have been approved by the Government and for which work is currently on are: [...] Advanced satellite for cartographic mapping applications Cartosat-2, Microwaveremote sensing satellite with all weather capability Radar Imaging satellite, Satellite for oceanography studies and services Oceansat-2. Remote Sensing satellite for natural resources management applications (Resourcesat-2), Development and Qualification of re-entry and recovery Technologies for future space Transportation system and conduct of Micro-Gravity Research (SRE-1and 2), Advanced satellite for meteorological observations (INSAT-3D), Indo-French Joint mission for tropical climatic research (Megha-Tropiques) are some of the others."

All Points Blog links to a The Hindu article informing us India and Russia will jointly develop the GLONASS-K GPS satellites. From the short article: ""Under the space co-operation agreements signed during President Vladimir Putin's India visit, both countries will jointly develop new generation GLONASS-K satellite for the GLONASS global positioning system, which will function parallelly with the American GPS," Indian Ambassador Kanwal Sibal said. Addressing an internet press conference last evening, he said Russia intends to operationalise GLONASS by 2010 by completing the cluster of 24 satellites."

A few recent geoblogs entry discussed the status of webmapping in India. There's Dan Karran's entry on Google's approach to crowdsourcing map data in India, which is on the same topic as the GEB's entry about local knowledge power for India mapping and APB links to an article about tackling urban problems with GIS in India. From the first link: "I was curious about this after the State of the Map conference but it seems last week Michael Jones, the CTO of Google Earth, shone a little light on the subject of Google's crowdsourced maps of India (along with other geo things from Google) at the Cambridge Conference. I've transcribed the part of the podcast that really interested me (see below), describing what they've built up in terms of geodata for 50 Indian cities and how they are doing it with a pilot project to deploy a 'care package' to countries to let the citizens map it for themselves based on local knowledge and Google's excellent aerial imagery sources." See also numerous Indian-related stories below.

From the Spacemart web site : India's "ISRO will launch Carto-2A satellite which has Cartography applications including remote sensing, ground water development and a resolution of one meter, by end of January 2008 or first week of February." Click here for details of the article.