Now after many success and notable accomplishments ISRO has taken a rare step in field of education. They call it as “INDIA’S MOMENTOUS JOURNEY IN THE SPACE RACE”. ISRO has started an educational institute known as “Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology”. This was established in 2007-08, IIST is a deemed university.

They are offering

1) Undergraduate Programme (B Tech) in Aerospace Engineering, Avionics and Physical Sciences

2) Post Graduate Programme (M Tech) in advanced areas

3) Doctoral and Post Doctoral Programmes in niche areas of Space Sciences.

A few outstanding features of this institute are written below:

1) Students who would complete the undergraduate program with minimum of 6.5 CGPA would be absorbed into ISRO as scientist/Engineer SC. These students would have to complete minimum 5 years in ISRO and then they are free to continue with ISRO or pursue their interest in any other field. (Well if you are in ISRO I doubt you would leave and join anything in India!!!)

2) IIST is a fully residential college. They will pay everything for you, they will even give 3K per semester as book grant

3) They have tied up with International Organization for student and faculty exchange programs. (I am not sure if that will happen regularly or often, but I rarely doubt ISRO…. )

Needless to say as you can guess from the idea of the institute is to create man power for Indian Space Program. This would be grooming ground for the best Indian Space brains. ISRO with budgets which can be termed as peanuts in comparison to NASA has been able to successfully take Indian Space Program to great heights. The countries which can match India’s Space Prowess cannot be counted in double digits. Essentially the students of this program would have access to the special practical classes, interact with the senior scientists of ISRO, would be able to take up student projects.

4) A small brief about the student projects that have been undertaken in IIST are in the areas of Robotics, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Advanced Solar Cell, Autonomous Firefighter.

5) The summer trainings and winter trainings in the labs of ISRO.

This is one of those institutes which will create a name for India and would surely stand in the leagues of IITs, IIMs or ISC. If governments policy would dilute the standards of IITs and IIMs then ISC Bangalore and IIST Thiruvananthapuram would stand tall for years to come.

6) Admissions to B Tech program is done through an All India Entrance Test ASAT – 2010 across 30 centers. This exam will be held 16th April, 2010.

Further information can be obtained from the website IIST’s Website..

May the wishes of the founders of this Institution come true and IIST be a World Class Academic Institution.

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Bhuvan is a web tool that provides medium to high resolution satellite imagery of virtually the entire India over the internet.Thanks to the efforts of ISRO that India has its own version of Google Earth. 

How to access Bhuvan?

• Bhuvan is compatible with Internet Explorer only
• Visit http://bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in/
• Register on the website
• Login with your credentials
• Download and Install the Bhuvan Plug-in
• You are ready to explore

Features

• It is a web based tool and needs no software to be installed except a plug-in for Internet Explorer
• You can take snapshot of the displayed map anytime. But make sure to take a note of the path where the image has been saved
• You can add photos to a place just like you did in Google Earth
• Other tools like measurement, navigation map are also available

Snapshot of Kolkata as seen in Bhuvan:

As Bhuvan is in beta stage, it has lot of bugs now. When I used Bhuvan on my Vista PC, my display drivers generated error many times. I use Google Earth on my PC and display drivers has never generated any error. I am sure Bhuvan will undergo changes as it is tested and the errors are reported.