Slashdot Mirror
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."
I am always surprised to see so many countries going at it by themselves, if we pooled resources, we would be maybe a couple of steps forward, instead of sending orbiters and robots.
In all seriousness, it's cheaper and easier to send a rocket to Mars than it is to undertake the kind of legislative and social engineering required to fix Delhi's traffic and India's electrical problems.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
and their cars catch fire
At least they weren't big fires. They were Nano fires.
India spent $90 million to send a LRO (to the moon) as detailed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1. The US spent $583 million to do the same http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Reconnaissance_Orbiter. Why do you think jobs are being shipped overseas from the US?
And if I read the pages correctly, NASA's probe still works, while India's stopped working after a year. thank you, come again...
India claims it can send something to orbit the Mars for $100 millions. Can anyone believe that?
You need to read between the lines here. They're going to build a $10 million communications satellite and hitchhike on a Russian rocket (which, based on Russia's Mars exploration history, means the rocket will die somewhere on the way to Mars... just ask China how that deal worked out for them) by offering to put $90 million toward fuel. Then they will route all call center traffic through this satellite, introducing a latency of several minutes between the caller and the call center rep, causing most callers to give up without costing the companies they called any money. So yes, I believe they will attempt it, but no, they will not succeed because all of Russia's attempts (Russia, not the USSR) have failed so far.
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.
Let's see, the United States, paying US rates for labour, managed to build, fly and land the Pathfinder on Mars for about $150 million ('92 dollars) in direct expenditure and spent about the same again running the mission. I think the Indians could conceivably an equivalent mission for less direct expenditure, but that is not a good measure of the peripheral expenditure and effort that would be required to obtain a similar knowledge and infrastructure base to that the US started from.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
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.
Sadly, it's not "Funny", it's "Informative".
Absence of proof != proof of absence.
Slashdot has interesting and informative posts on many topics, but I don't know why everything goes to hell the moment India is mentioned..
1) It doesn't take a hugeass rocket to send an unmanned probe to Mars. The amount of energy needed once you're in the right orbit to escape earth's gravity is minimal. So it's not that crazy to imagine India doing it given that they already got a probe to reach the moon. It's the next step, not a massive leap. Putting a lander on the moon or Mars, or manned spaceflight would be a much bigger step. So the figure of 100 million is not outlandish and it's very possible and a logical progression given the current technical capabilities of the Indian space program. In fact, India may well be able to use one of their existing rockets for this, the hard part is making sure interplanetary probes get captured into the orbit of the target planet, instead of missing it completely (something that's not that hard to do and multiple countries have aimed and missed in the past, I remember a Mercury probe that ended up orbiting the sun).
2) Yes, India has overwhelming amounts of corruption. The space program is one of the better run organizations though.
3) Even though India is a poor country, due to the sheer size of the population the amount of money the government controls is huge. Not USA/China huge but at least the size of large European economies. 100 million is pocket change. And not spending it on a research mission to Mars that can help advance technology in the country doesn't mean it would go towards feeding hungry people. Just like reducing 100 million of the defence budget in the US won't put that money into schools or universities or healthcare or whatever.
4) It has little to do with the slowing Indian economy (even if it grows at 5% that's far more than most other countries in the world right now).
5) Talk of burning cars or powerless villages is just bigoted racist arrogant illogical bullshit.
The Mars Climate Orbiter (a NASA mission) cost $330 million and failed completely. Sometimes these things happen in space exploration. One year out of a two year mission isn't awful for a fledgling space programme like India's, and for that sort of cost.