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Indian Prime Minister Formally Announces Mars Mission
neo12 writes in with the news that India plans on being the 6th country to launch a mission to mars. "Making the first formal announcement on the country's Mars mission, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday said India will send a mission to the Red Planet that will mark a huge step in the area of science and technology. 'Recently, the Cabinet has approved the Mars Orbiter Mission. Under this Mission, our spaceship will go near Mars and collect important scientific information,' he said addressing the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the occasion of the 66th Independence Day."
And there are only two countries that have successfully landed on Mars (by landing year):
Japan launched a probe, but it failed to achieve orbit (it "missed the planet") and China had a joint venture with Russia that never left Earth's orbit. Wikipedia has a nice graphic illustrating the history of Mars exploration.
Chandrayaan-1 failed in less than one year and half of its science payload was donated by other countries. It had severe thermal issues that prevented it from using more than one science mission at a time for a while. They eventually had to boost the orbit to try to cool it down, but it still failed.
The LRO doesn't have any donated science payload and has a far more comprehensive mission than that of the Chandrayaan-1. The LRO has completed a comprehensive and detailed map of the surface of the Moon as well as discovering water in a crater with LCROSS. The LRO is running fine and will probably be in orbit and returning data for several more years. This is what another $500 million gets you.
Well, the Indian economy has slowed down considerably, investor confidence is down, and years later, many of the problems noted in the posts above still remain to be solved. While this mission had been previously reported in other sources, the linked article was published on August 15--Indian Independence day--so the official announcement by the PM sounds more like the kind of feel-good pitch that one can expect in any 'address to the nation,' in most places in the world. The Chandrayaan mission was similarly announced 9 years ago during an independence day speech by a former PM, and completed 5 years later, although the costs ($90 million) were substantially higher than initially announced. Given that track record, it seems highly unlikely that this project can be pulled off in $100 million, although I suppose like any government initiative, the project probably has a better chance of getting funded if the scientists asked for that amount than what it might actually take (say, 10 times as much?), and then ask for more later! :-) At the end of the day, any kind of government investing in science is a good thing, and the recent Mars Curiosity landing is more evidence that a space mission captures people's imaginations like nothing else. Hopefully, this mission will have that kind of effect on the next generation of students in India.
Supposedly 30% of their households don't have electricity and the remainder suffer from regular blackouts, and they want to go to Mars?
Why explore space?
Granted, this was in 1970 and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center director - but he made many valid points and his letter is also true for India.