Slashdot Mirror
India and NASA to Explore Moon Together
hotsauce writes "NASA administrator Griffin on a visit to Indian space facilities in Bangalore has signed an agreement to explore the moon with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This agreement will see NASA instruments on a 2008 Indian moon mission, and further cooperation is being explored. An Indian paper has a different take on the visit. Interesting answer by Griffin on NASA outsourcing to ISRO."
And you thought the latency on calls to Dell's help desk was bad now...
Trolling is a art,
Griffin said NASA was not looking to outsource some of its work to ISRO. NASA was looking to combine the resources both agencies to undertake ventures of mutual interest.
(Yeah, yeah, I know I'm enabling bad behavior, but slashdot needs all the help it can get.)
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Curried Tang
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
The summary author would have been more correct in linking to the following story rather than attempting to make commentary by selecting the link they did: http://sify.com/news/fullstory.php?id=14200860
It's not "another take" they link to, but rather "another story". Related, yes, but lets try a little harder (yes, it's slashdot, etc, etc but it doesn't hurt to try)
Since progress in this field is really beneficial to all of humanity, it's really good to see more countries joining forces to move progress along. I think in the long run privitization of the space industry is the way to go, but until that industry takes off a world wide coalition to push things forward might be our best bet for progress.
Go ahead and call me unreliable; reliable is just a synonym for predictable.
The race to open the first lunar Kwik-E-Mart.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
ISRO's mission will carry payloads for NASA. It is piggybacking in a literal sense, but the other way around.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I think that, when they talk about lifting sanctions on "Indian space units", they mean relaxing/removing the sanctions imposed on high-tech exports to India.
1998 was when the U.S. flipped out over India's nuclear tests.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
What part of "minimum miss distance" do you not quite understand?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
This, combined with the recent nuclear deals with India, are prettly clearly geopolitical moves to bolster an economic and technological counterweight to China. Space science has little to do with it.
The minimum shown there is based on a three-sigma variance - there's only an 0.03% chance the comet fragment will come closer than that. So, one in ten thousand. Don't lose any sleep over it.
Flying carpets come out of Persian or Arab folklore, not Indian. I know you think they're all the same, but you're just displaying your typical Western ignorance, as are the moderators that modded you funny.
Your joke is equivalent to if NASA decided to work with the French Space Program and I made some jokes about German stereotypes (all the astronauts will have to eat sauerkraut, etc). It doesn't make any sense, and I doubt it would be modded funny.
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Because Japan was never ruled by greedy idiots (British and Muslims). Because India was dumb enough not to invest in its own military and modernization.
Those who give stupid comparisions need to understand that there still are homeless and starving population in US of A and that these two things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
I know the world exists because I exist.
India has been courted by Presidents of both parties in America, and counts a full 1/3 of Congress in the India Caucus. That speaks volumes for how important India is to our American interests. Then there's the obvious close ties India has to Europe, and especially Britain. American foreign policy interests are also greatly helped by a country that is the world's largest democracy in a rather un-democratic neighborhood, and has very good relations with Israel, also in a neighborhood where Israel has few friends.
The cold war relations between America and India were truly a mistake, and a lost opportunities for both our countries, and I'm glad to see the US finally form the strong bonds with a country that will necessarily be one of the most important in the world in the coming years.
Years of propping up dictators in Africa and Pakistan have done us no good, and have only bred festering flash-points. It's time we gave some serious thought to a relataionship that has and will continue to produce excellent dividends for both parties.
Of course, to them [NASA] it probably is a joke, since they've already been there.
A surprising number of people are expressing this sentiment. NASA "has already been there" with much older equipment, most of which was simply geared to keep humans alive. This mission gives the opportunity to do real science with modern equipment, and answer new questions, for instance Smart 1's survey of surface elements to confirm theories about the origin of the moon.
Lies about crimes
...received from my Crystal Ball(TM):
"New Delhi, we have a problem."
"Thank you for calling Mission Control. May I be having your name, address, and current software version please?"
"The software has locked us out. We need you to make a course correction in exactly 20 seconds!"
"Certainly sir. If I could just be having your license number please."
"License number?! Just fire thrusters 2 and 3 for 4.5 seconds on my mark!"
"You're Mark? Thank you for giving me your name, but I am needing your license code too please."
"Our license number is going to be 3-D-E-A-D-G-U-Y-S if you don't fire the thrusters in--5 seconds!"
"If this is an emergency request, please be giving me your express service code."
"Express... Hey Buzz, crack the main hatch open for 5 seconds on my mark... NOW! We'll have to hope this works."
"I'm sorry sir, but it appears you have voided your warranty. Please be having a nice day."[click]
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
FYI: Roche limit does not apply for three reasons first the fragment is probably held together by chemical bonds not gravity and second on a near miss there is little time for such effects to take place. (Yes over time a glass of water will evaporate in a low humidity room but it take more than a few min for that to be significant.) And finally even where the fragment to break apart each fragment would continue more or less on the same path which would cause it to miss the earth.
.0098km/s/s = 0.00445km/s/s and that's tangential to it's path but it's passing the earth at that point so it makes little difference. Steeping back to 30,000 KM the object is accelerating at .00111km/s but most of that vector is not pulling the asteroid into a collision course. You can think of it as a large vector along it's path and a much smaller vector pulling it into a collision course. The further out you go the smaller the net force and the smaller the fraction that's pulling the object into a collision course.
As to why you ignore the earth's gravity in all but the closest near miss: With a V relative of 15km(km/s) and a distance of 15,360 KM the object is being accelerated by a force of (12,756.3/(12,756.3+15,360)) *
Earth's gravity is important when you want to know how the object is being deflected but it does little to alter the probability of impact for objects with a high relative velocity.
PS: Feel free to calculate the two vectors at 30,000KM and 60,000KM on a near miss.
(Now with line breaks...)
The Japanese were way ahead of Indians in many respects. Singular language and religion for the most part, with general homogeneity. The Indians have a fragmented culture - hundred of subdialects, subsects of religion that are well nigh incompatible with one another. Indians and Africans are very interesting to me, because most people see them from the outside as one monolithic culture, but they are an amalgam of dozens, hundreds of cultures. They get along imperfectly because they are different. This is mis-perceived by outsiders. India and Africa also share the same problems associated with Imperialism - and how it negatively affected their populace. Africa, moreso, obviously. The Japanese, by and large, are one people.
NATIONALISM: Getting their asses kicked in WWII was a GREAT motivator. No offense to any Japanese members of our community. India has no such unifying struggle.
Also, even back then, the Japanese were working towards a urban environment. Cities all over. Things go way faster the denser the population is in an urban center with access to education and opportunity. India is not as such.
Indians also has entrenched cultural mores that make their society resistant to change. Not so Japanese. They are a remarkably adaptable people.
SCALE: India is a billion people+. There is no dictatorship/regime to issue authoritarian demands. JApan is a much smaller country. Scale counts. Bigger things move slower. Exceptions are dictatorships - etc, where there are singular visions and people are forced to adhere.
Poor economic policies. It's easy to call them poor in hindsight, but many countries thought them a good idea at the time (witness the Soviets, with otherwise very impressive achievements). Also, these policies were born out of fear--India had been colonized by a company, and was very concerned about foreign trade and private companies.
Since the 1990s, India has changed economic course, with good results. The Indian government still believes that satelite communications forms an important part of basic infrastructure in a country that large, and studies have shown that it is cheaper for India to run its own space program than pay others to build and maintain satelites and infrastructure.
India spends $700 million a year on its space program. So the choice is: give each citizen less than a dollar a year, or build a modern communications and research infrastructure that enables enterprise and creates jobs. No country ever got rich off handouts.
Lies about crimes
I know you think they're all the same, but you're just displaying your typical Western ignorance, as are the moderators that modded you funny.
Typical Western ignorance?!?!?!!?
As you type your screed on a digital computer, and send it over the internet with satellite linkups.
I'll say one thing: At least Western ignorance is rather inventive.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
wow. how can such a (presumably) well educated crowd as slashdot remain so fricking ignorant about the world? whats with all these racist jokes? sometimes when i read slashdot's blatant racism, methinks that india is doing the world a huge favor by taking away valuable jobs from the hands of such ignorance.
first, you forget that the US dumped tons of $$ into the reconstruction of japan. the british did not do that for india, despite having wrecked the indian economic potential far more surely than the americans did the japanese. you forget that india suffered 200 yrs of brutal colonial rule that left all but a tiny fragment of its ppl uneducated. you forget that under colonialism, indians weren't even allowed to run anything that resembled industry... it was illegal to do more than grow basic commodity crops for british consumption. when india got indepedence, it had an industrial revolution to catch up on. japan did not have to go through that -- they had industrial know-how all along.
the indian space research organization is single-mindedly dedicated to the development of technology that benefits civilians. you can read about that yourself. the moon-mission is the first gamble they are taking wherein they hope that a challenging outer-space mission will both boost their technological know-how and in turn help civilians in the future, and also ignite the minds of indian children regarding technology and space. yes, i understand that americans who were born before the 90s can't see anything outside the cold-war prism. but really, indians just want to push their technology further...
why did japan not invest into military and nuclear technology the way india has? simply b/c it has always been under the american military and nuclear umbrella. india, on the other had, was treated as a pariah by the US for not kowtowing to american foriegn policy. india has had to suffer embargos and sanctions for its right to defend itself. in contrast the obstentatiously peace-loving japanese could pretend that it didn't want to develop a strong military or militaristic technology, when in reality it has just counted on the US to protect it.
ok, enough. i'm not getting paid to educate this lot. nor is it entirely feasible.
"Why did Japan succeed but India fail?"
I think comparision between India and Japan is wrong. Japan was fighting the world during WWII i.e. it was a world power, India at the time was coming out of a British rule that had slaved it.
All Japan really had to do is recover from WWII and the nukes. India had to start from scratch. Its only been 55 odd years or so since British rule ended in India. 55 Years is not a lot of time for a country to get freedom and stand on its feat.
Closest I would compare here is that Japan has succeeded and India is still writing its exam, judgement is still out.
There is a reason to why everyone is worried about outsourcing to India. This is also where NASA can learn from India. Budget for ISRO is nothing compared to that of NASA, nonetheless ISRO is in a select class of organization that has managed to launch a one ton plus satellite into orbit.
This is where NASA has most to gain, getting things done for lesser costs. Further, no single event except for wars have helped technology as much as NASA's Man on the Moon mission.
ISRO's exploration of the moon has similar objectives as well.
Please re-parse that sentence. You assumed it meant that Western people are typically ignorant. A second interpretation could be that GP is displaying a specific type of ignorance, one that is typical to Western people, namely, in the area of foreign cultures. I move that he's quite right.
As for your misrepresentations about the Brits not permitting industrial development, you may want to have words with this company as well as others. When the Brits left, the Indians did not want major assistance programs from any western power and were prefering to flirt with the Soviets at the time.
See my journal, I write things there
Not to mention, India's budget allocations for space exploration is miniscule compared to, not just imperial Japan's war-budget, but also to India's own spending on poverty alleviation. Perhaps not compared to primary education or healthcare in some parts, but hey, you weren't complaining about the state of schools in Bastar region were you?
More than mere navel gazing.
And you bring religion into this because??? Just proves you are a bigotted idiot.
kind regards.
Actually I do believe most of the technology is invented by the non-ignorant Americans... or it comes from Japan.
There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
You talk lines quite easily.. if you were Indian or know our history, you wouldn't generalise.
It's hard to trust "western powers" after 200 years of colonial rule. Colonial rule started cause we (Indians) trusted the British in business in the first place.
About health and literacy programmes, yes it's unfortunate that our level of literacy is low. But it doesn't mean there isn't enthusiasm to help. Factors such as corruption have hurt this.. but we still have goals to make everyone literate. It is in fact a basic right of every child in India to be entitled free and compulsary education. But in a highly populated country like India, it's easier said than done.
But all things must move, and just cause we want health and literacy, it doesn't mean that we just ignore other development. There's greater room for development.. due to the amount of population (which also means high competition) and the _quality of education available to the middle classes_, India has a large number of intelligent people. Scientific research and development, and engineering would usher in development of infrastructure.. these are related.
Again, all this is easier said than done.. but instead of pooh-poohing our approach, you should be glad we are doing something about it. India is not very far off from the likes of the U.S. We value freedom too.. we are a democracy. Our markets are just as capitalist.
There are incidents you'd prolly hear about, about communal violence, etc. But do you hear about the number of Indians of different religions, cultures, etc. living in perfect harmony (read the vast majority of the Indian public)? It's quite a feat to pull off. It's no simple task to administer a country of this size.
Progress can only be slow and steady. It's certainly not flat as you can see.
Banu