Once we got to the border, the military camp was next to a sacred lake with a little temple on its shore. The public was allowed to go up there as long as they followed the rules. When asked what the situation was on the border, the Soldiers replied on their patrols they waved at the guys on the other side and made sure everybody stayed in their own lanes. The area, other than the lake, was pretty desolate and cold. Guys on shit detail in the high altitudes do their job, but they know the folks on the other side are manning the same shit sandwich, too. One of the officers told us a story where some newly wed couple showed up with an expensive SLR camera. They took the film and tossed the camera into the lake, then invited them to eat those weird tibetan samosas and boiled eggs at the lahri’s there. This was back in 1992, so, I don’t know how things are today.

I can’t remember which lake it was though, Tsomgo or Guru Dongmar. Probably Tsomgo.

I’ve heard about a scale model of the Golden Temple that was built at the Indian Military Academy at Dehradun to train soldiers before Operation Bluestar. Has anyone else read or heard anything about this?

Sikhnet has extensive information on it via their archived discussion forums. You can do a search there for more details.

To India’s point, I think this imagery is a leveler when you compare governments to insurgents, resistance groups, terrorists, and other low-budget peeps. It may not have given them an iota of useful info on how to bomb the Mumbai trains, but it could be used to do some initial scoping of dams, chemical plants, nuke plants etc.

By the way, I can certify that I have spent more time with Google Earth than on internet porn in 2006. AMAZING. And that google earth community – quite a roundtable of junkies.

These are the same type of people that outed the CIA’s secret rendition program. Their hobby was writing down the tail numbers of airplanes that took off from airports around the world. Thank goodness for kooks.

Amit,

I have played with Quickbird and IKONOS images for Andaman Islands. In fact, even on internet you can find high-resolution satellite images for pre- and post- Boxer Day tsunami and Andaman Islands. They show all details of flooding and mangroves.

I agree that these images mean jack unless one has the manpower and budget to look them through and understand.

In Abhi post, some hacks got a kick out the whole thing and researched thoroughly.

NIMA is now called National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Their satellites have ability to lock onto certain ‘areas’ for a while, and they have had this for quite a while, you can read this in many novels/thrillers. Their resolution is probably within a coke can in certain atmospheric conditions like no cloud/overcast skies, nice humidity, low pollution, reflectance etc. India has mastered this locking using a similar technique in CARTOSAT, I believe CARTOSAT is unique amongst the satellites which report elevation, becuase it reports elevation in a single pass, all others are way inaccurate compared to CARTOSAT (imho, of course).

You can buy less than 1×1 m color images from Quickbird and IKONOS. I believe India also has this particular capability, but whats the use? As anybody who has cursorily looked at this knows that as your resolution increases, area of coverage decreases. So you need to ‘lock’ as the satellite passes through. This is what makes it easy to fool spectral satellites, and how India fooled US in 1998. The US Spy satellite/airplane are outed on the Internet by a group of enthusiastic US people, who post the orbit times, altitude, launch date etc. I personally think that this is a no-no, but some people are crazy, they get their kicks on weird things. And of course you need zillions to cover the world 24x7x365. And zillions to analyze this enormous amounts of data. Even with unlimited money, it is difficult for anybody, India has a ways to go. We should partner with the US, because we don’t have this kind of budget.