This is the 16th mission for India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). The rocket placed satellite Oceansat-2 and six small ones into space from the Satish Dhawan spaceport in Sriharikota city, 90 kilometres north of the southern city of Chennai.

India will use Oceansat-2, for monitoring ocean patterns and identifying fishing zones as well as helping with coastal studies, weather forecasting and climate studies.

The six small satellites belong to other countries — four to Germany, one to Switzerland and one to Turkey.

The Prime Minister also laid the foundation for a new space complex of the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO), by tele-link, at Sadiqnagar in New Delhi.

The IIST has been conceived as the world’s first space university and will offer a complete range of academic programmes from the undergraduate to the post graduate level,” IST director B.N. Suresh said.

The new space complex in New Delhi would help the ISRO in its endeavours to popularise space technology’s people-oriented and development-oriented services such as tele-medicine, tele-education, disaster management and village resource management in the northern parts of the country, ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair said.

He also distributed Awards to ISRO Scientists for their outstanding contribution.

While Google Earth shares only single layer information, its Indian counterpart would share multi-layer information using the images exclusively from indigenous satellites. The images would be visible to the user both in two and three dimensions using the navigation tools provided.

Unlike Google earth, Bhuvan will provide multi-layered images and the images would be updated every year, where as Google earth updates only in four years.

Bhuvan has best resolutions over the Indian sub-continent. The resolutions currently on offer are good enough to view a vehicle moving on a road quite clearly.

Bhuvan allows users to fly from space to street level, grab, spin and zoom down to any place. Viewers can zoom into Bhuvan maps up to 10 metres compared to Google Earth’s 200 metres and Wikemapia’s 50 metres.

Bhuvan has a many India-specific features like weather information, administrative boundaries of all states and districts, etc. It also provides tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing and visualizing thematic information.

An additional feature provided by Bhuvan would be allowing the user to scroll through the newspapers of selective cities across the country. The user can zoom on to the city of their choice to go through the local news.

Several local problems like floods, famines, infrastructure development, education and administration would be addressed in a better way through this new mapping system.

Bhuvan currently only offers images taken between one and three years ago even over India. It combines satellite imagery from various sensors onboard IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) satellites and transposes them on a 3-D globe.

Hyderabad-based National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), a part of ISRO, developed the content using data provided by Indian satellites like Resourcesat-1.

The launch ceremony was organized by Astronautical Society of India in New Delhi. The day marks the 90th birth anniversary of the father of Indian space programme Vikram Sarabhai.

The application can be downloaded from http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/