Hello, and welcome to GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is Drones. They’re everywhere and fast becoming a major tool for monitoring our planet. But as of late June, you won’t find them at U.S. National Parks. National Park Service Director Jonathan B. Jarvis signed a policy memorandum that directs superintendents nationwide to prohibit launching, landing or operating unmanned aircraft on lands and waters administered by the National Park Service. Here’s an AP video that sums up the situation:
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
The SPOT 7 Earth-observation satellite, designed and developed by Airbus Defence and Space, was launched on June 30 by a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in India. It will join the orbit in which its twin, SPOT 6, and the very-high-resolution observation satellites Pléiades 1A and 1B are located, and will be positioned at 180 degrees in relation to SPOT 6. With both SPOT satellites in orbit, acquisition capacity will be boosted to six million square kilometers per day.
The Tanzanian Ministry of Energy and Minerals, with funding from the World Bank’s International Development Association, launched a project to upgrade its Mining Cadastre Information Management System to support online transactions and provide an integrated geo-portal for all stakeholders in the mining sector.
ISC Kosmotras launched a cluster of small spacecraft on a RS-20 rocket, including the first private Russian remote-sensing satellite: SPUTNIX Company’s TabletSat-Aurora. The data will be used in commercial, scientific, educational and environmental projects.
In Industry Headlines, IMAGINiT Technologies released updated versions of its Scan to BIM and IMAGINiT Utilities software products, including Utilities for Revit, Utilities for Civil 3D, Utilities for Vault Client and Utilities for Vault Server.
At its 25th Anniversary Annual Meeting, EARSC recognized GeoVille as the company to have made the most significant contribution to the development of the Earth Observation sector in Europe.
CartoDB added the ability to use geotagged Twitter data from inside CartoDB–no coding skills required–to create interactive, animated maps of Twitter activity.
The Esri ArcGIS Online platform now is authorized and accredited by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a secure platform for delivering cloud-based geospatial services.
And Boundless released OpenGeo Suite 4.1, featuring new application development templates that use a production-ready version of OpenLayers 3, and a free QGIS installer for Windows and OSX.
And now for today’s Final Thought:
On the Sensors & Systems Web site, Editor Matt Ball writes about two significant recent announcements: Google’s purchase of Skybox Imaging and the U.S. Commerce Department lifting imagery-resolution restrictions on DigitalGlobe’s soon-to-be-launched WorldView-3 satellite. Ball expects the announcements to “turbo-charge” the importance of the geospatial industry in coming months, but you’ll need to read the article to find all of the reasons why.
That’s it for this broadcast, I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
