ISRO Bhuvan was launched on the occasion of 90th birth anniversary of Vikram Sarabhai who is considered to be the father of Indian space program. National Remote Sensing Agency played an important role in the creation of this product.

They used data provided by satellites including Resourcesat-1 to get the best possible imagery for India.

ISRO claims that the application can provide imagery of up to 10 metres for major Indian cities compared to 200 meters provided by Google Earth.

Minimum System Requirements:

• Operating System: Windows XP/Vista;CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+ ;System Memory (RAM): 512MB ; Hard Disk: 2GB free space ;Network Speed: 768 Kbits/sec; Graphics Card: 3D-capable with 32MB of VRAM; Screen: 1280×1024,32-bit True Color
• To browse Bhuvan, you require the Bhuvan Plug-in which can be downloaded from this website, after registration and you will also need DirectX 9.0 or higher version (www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/) and MS .NET framework 2.0 or above for installing the plug-in. Please note that the Bhuvan Plug-in can be installed with administrative privileges only.

In order to download Bhuvan Software you have to forst register with Bhuvan Website. Click Here to go to Bhuvan’s Official Web site abd register there.

Then you will directed to a page from where you can download the Bhuvan plugin from here (its actually Skyline’s terraexplorer plugin) and Microsoft’s DirectX.

In order to install the plugin, you need to have the administrator privilege in your machine. The product works only in IE and is quite buggy to start with. Hopefully we will get much better versions in the future.

>> BHUVAN QUICK DOWNLOAD LINK (Click to download Bhuvan Plugin) <<

Bhuvan Features

• Visualise 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources etc.
• 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)

ISRO Bhuvan was launched on the occasion of 90th birth anniversary of Vikram Sarabhai who is considered to be the father of Indian space program. National Remote Sensing Agency played an important role in the creation of this product.

They used data provided by satellites including Resourcesat-1 to get the best possible imagery for India.

ISRO claims that the application can provide imagery of up to 10 metres for major Indian cities compared to 200 meters provided by Google Earth.

A prototype (beta) of this application was launched on 12th August 2009.

Tata Consultancy Services has a 3 crore deal with ISRO to make advanced moon map which is taken by Chandrayaan. An official said this software will be a freeware and it needs a license for usage to check if the users are Indian nationals. This will provide better resolution compared to existing mapping solutions. Bhuvan will feature a zoom level of up to 10 meters while the Google Earth features a zoom level of up to 200 meters. ISRO has also decided to make a tracking and mapping antenna(30×15)m the largest in India in Chennai for advanced 3D mapping and resources.

The next version of Bhuvan is expected to be called Bhuvan Chandra Bhumi, which will feature both earth and moon in resolution upto 347 m maximum in near side and 432 m far side which is taken by Chandrayaan. The actual zoom level of the moon was set to 150 m but due to lack of system power and steering problems caused it to be reduced. It is developed by TCS, Infosys, Wipro and ISRO along with the partnership of Mahindra-Satyam and Cognizant Solutions. All leading Indian computer technology companies have participated in this venture with TCS as the main partner. This version is expected to be launched on early 2011 and be operational by the end of 2009 or early 2010. Nearly 90% of moon surface is captured by Chandrayaan with best qualtiy of imaging. HCL Technologies and BPL are the media partners for it.

The latest version of Bhuvan will be able to take more closer pictures of the Indian Subcontinent as compared to the Google Earth. The new ISRO Bhuvan will also feature a multi layer information mapping while the present Google Earth features a single layer information mapping system. Apart from that, Bhuvan will also update map information every year contrary to the Google Earth which updates its map information every 4 years.

“With Bhuvan we will be able to produce very local information which will be specific to only to our own country. This information available from this mapping system will be useful in addressing very local problems like floods, famines, infrastructure development, education and much more,” said ISRO chairman Dr G Madhavan Nair.

Unlike Google Earth, however the Bhuvan application will not be downloadable and will not allow users to host content in the near future. “We are not competing with Google,” said Jayaraman. A Google spokesperson declined to comment. According to P. Nag, director of the National Atlas and Thematic Mapping Organisation, a Kolkata-based mapping agency that uses remote-sensing data to build India’s atlas, the Bhuvan project demonstrates the country’s expertise in both information and space technology.