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The Indian Space Research Organisation plans to launch a website modelled on Google Earth within the next six months. The site will use Indian data and have military sites carefully blacked out.

In the past, ISRO chair G. Madhavan Nair and other senior Indian officials have been highly critical of Google's policy of displaying data of military facilities on its Google Earth site.

The Indian-Asia News Service quotes Nair as saying: 'Our images are quite good and even better than Google.’

Nair said India possesses satellites that can provide imagery of the Earth in a variety of spectral bands and with a resolution better than one metre.

The Indian remote sensing system now includes Cartosat 2A, which has the ability to generate such imagery in panchromatic mode.

However, it is unclear how long it will take to generate the significant amounts of imagery required for a Google-like site. Even if only India is to be covered, it may take months, and possibly even years, to generate cloud-free imagery from a single satellite.

However, it might be possible to generate complete coverage of the sub-continent from lower resolution colour imagery acquired over the last decade from any of the ISRO multi-spectral sensors in orbit.

To build one-metre colour products, ISRO will need to fuse Cartosat 2A data with data from other sensors.

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