Geodesy Village

Geodesy, the discipline of measuring and representing the Earth’s surface, is one of the oldest sciences,  which forms the fundamental basis for any Earth related studies including its atmosphere, oceans and biosphere. However, knowledge in this subject of basic science has been below par in this country due to many inexplicable reasons. In order to popularise this subject of scientific importance, a National Centre for Geodesy (NCG) has been set up at IIT Kanpur with approval and funding support from the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India.

The primary objectives of the NCG are- capacity building in Geodesy through various outreach activities, development, and dissemination of related educational resource and conducting cutting edge research and development in Geodesy while acting as the national resource centre to provide extensive support to the students and researchers from academia and state/central government departments in the country.

To accomplish the objective of setting up a national resource centre, NCG is trying to set up a Geodesy village at IIT Kanpur. This involves setting up a core site, also called as a fundamental site. This site is a kind of geodetic observatory which helps in refining the global geodetic reference frame, e.g. the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF). Observations from different co-located instruments are synergistically used for this purpose.

The following Video gives an overview of the site-plan of the Geodesy Village: