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Mangalyaan Gets Ready To Enter Mars Orbit

Posted by timothy on from the space-is-a-big-place dept.

William Robinson (875390) writes India's Mars Orbiter Mission, known as Mangalyaan is now at a distance of just nine million kilometres from the red planet, and is scheduled to enter the orbit of Mars at 7.30 am on September 24. Mangalyaan was launched on 5th November 2013 by ISRO, presently busy planning to reduce the speed of the spacecraft through the process of firing the LAM engine and bring it to 1.6 km/sec, before it is captured by the planet's gravity. Eventually, the mission's official updates page should catch up.

27 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Congratulations, India ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    India appears to be the ONE country that has the "ooomph" in terms of the CAN DO spirit

    Not only their space launch costs much less than the one from NASA, it costs less than the one from ESA (Europe), from Japan, from Russia and from China !

    We should learn from India on how to keep cost down

    Again, congratulations are in order for India !!

    1. Re:Congratulations, India ! by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 1, Funny

      Correct me if I'm wrong but... would you happen to be rooting for India by any chance?

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    2. Re:Congratulations, India ! by CrzyP · · Score: 1

      You're an idiot.

    3. Re:Congratulations, India ! by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      India is doing well economically and I think they have the right idea: they promote high tech industry and have a couple of high profile projects like these. This makes them more independent, builds their economy, and instills national pride. The wrong way to do it is to take things one at a time: first get plumbing and sanitation in place, and only then work on getting a meal into every child's belly, and only then provide basic education, and only then introduce mechanised farming, and only then work on a national road network and electrical system, and so on. India's space program is money well (and frugally) spent.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    4. Re:Congratulations, India ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Yeah, too bad there's a billion people there with no running water or plumbing, but hey, pictures of a dead rock!

      What *IS* this fucking emotional gushing you techno man-children have about space?

      Your first point does overshadow all here, but let's not dismiss the urgency to get away from the bloodlust of warfare.

      Anything seems to make more sense than sitting around killing ourselves while consuming this planet.

    5. Re:Congratulations, India ! by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 1

      As opposed to California, where there are only forty million people without running water.

    6. Re:Congratulations, India ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      >The wrong way to do it is to take things one at a time: first get plumbing and sanitation in place, and only then work on getting a meal into every child's belly, and only then provide basic education, and only then introduce mechanised farming, and only then work on a national road network and electrical system, and so on. India's space program is money well (and frugally) spent.

      So it's an excuse for not doing these things at all? India is such a shithole, and not because Indians are bad people. It's a shithole because they have the "can do" attitude when it comes to thing like space, but when it comes for caring for the bottom 50% of their country they're content to let them live like animals.

    7. Re:Congratulations, India ! by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      So it's an excuse for not doing these things at all?

      They are doing both the space program and doing something about living conditions. The problem is that fixing poverty is hard, and like the problem of travelling to the moon or Mars, you don't solve it merely by allocating a budget, that's only the start. If fixing poverty was easy, a lot of other countries wouldn't have any. Hell, perhaps the USA wouldn't have any. And fixing their poor living conditions probably costs a multiple of what it costs to run their space program. According to their 2013 budget, the Rural Development Ministry alone receives over 16 times the ISRA budget. My point is that I think it would be a big mistake to shift the +- 1 billion $ space budget to further rural development.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    8. Re:Congratulations, India ! by m00sh · · Score: 1

      I can teach you: pay people smaller salaries. Compare average income in India and The West to see why cost of building stuff is different. The cost of a potato is the income of the person who grew it.

      Total BS. With high tech projects, countries with lower per capita cannot compete because they cannot afford to buy the component pieces. Even if you have lots of people with low salaries in a warehouse, they can't just create the parts needed in a short time. Even if you have the components, you cannot just train people in a short time to integrate components that nobody in the country has used before.

      You say the cost of potato is the income of the person who grew it. But, what about oil? The price is about the same throughout the world. Even making parts would cost a lot more since the even the raw materials are a larger portion of the budget.

      I'm not an expert on India but what seems like a out of nowhere thing is usually a project started decades ago with lots of vision, leadership and direction. It's not just a lower salary so cheaper product thing.

    9. Re:Congratulations, India ! by Chewbacon · · Score: 1

      Hold on there. Plumbing and sanitation is an absolute MUST before you start putting food in everyone's belly. Are YOU gonna clean up that mess?

      --
      Chewbacon
      The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
    10. Re:Congratulations, India ! by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      No, the points you raise are irrelevant. All government science programs are constrained by budget and other things, regardless of countries. So what, do you even have a point?

      NASA has had incredible accomplishments with Mars exploration for over 40 years, limited budget and all.

    11. Re: Congratulations, India ! by kyjellyfish · · Score: 3, Funny

      All right!!! Let's add space exploration to the list of things we can outsource to India.

  2. Not news by Jiro · · Score: 4, Funny

    Because 9 million miles is no more newsworthy than 8 million or 10.

    I'm reminded of the old joke:

    "What famous event happened in 1732?"

    "George Washington was born."

    "Very good. Now what famous event happened in 1743?'

    "George Washington became 11 years old."

    1. Re:Not news by Ksevio · · Score: 2

      Well it's our one month warning. We need time to plan the Mars Orbit Entry Parties.

  3. MAVEN by llamahunter · · Score: 1

    I think there's also a NASA mission set to arrive at Mars on Sept 22nd, a few days before the ISRO one, no?

  4. It's only ahead of Siding Spring by a month by wisebabo · · Score: 2

    Hmm... It's only ahead of the comet Siding Spring by about a month. Will it have time/fuel to "duck and cover" by getting to the far side of the planet before the close approach of the comet and the potential of a cometary dust storm that could wreck it? (Contrary to what some people think, it doesn't take much energy to change your orbital position IF you've got time. A simple change of 1 meter/sec from the thrusters will, after one year mean a distance of over 30,000 km. That simplification ignores some orbital dynamics but you get the picture.) Of course Mangalyaan doesn't have a year but it has much greater delta-vee capability, its orbital insertion burn is (I think) 1.6 KM/sec. And maybe it would've been on the far side of the planet anyway.

    On the other hand, maybe it's near the comet NOW, or nearer to the comet than any other spacecraft. Perhaps it can take some good close-ups of the comet or at least see it from a different angle. (If it can see a full or partial eclipse of the sun by the comet, scientists may be able to determine the comet's composition or the composition of the comet's coma. It might be able to do it using radio wave occultation from earth.). In any case, it's good that there will be another spacecraft near the comet when it arrives at mars! Too bad the U.S. isn't willing to risk sacrificing one of its older orbiters (I think one has been around mars for about a decade) for a close flyby. (Again, given enough advance planning, a surprisingly small amount of delta-vee would be required to put one of the orbiters on a collision course, especially if gravitational chaotic resonances AKA "the interplanetary highway" were harnessed.)

    Too bad we didn't know about this close encounter say a decade ago. We might have been able to send a probe that could've used mars' gravity to slingshot a probe into a matching trajectory with it so that, like the ESA Rosetta probe, we could rendezvous, orbit and land on it!

    1. Re:It's only ahead of Siding Spring by a month by rasmusbr · · Score: 1

      Another way to look at it is that the close encounter between a comet and Mars is perhaps a once in a century opportunity to learn about how material from the comet interacts with Mars and its atmosphere, so the satellites in orbit around Mars should mainly be looking down at the effects on Mars.

      Spacecraft-comet encounters can be had a lot more frequently than spacecraft-planet-comet encounters.

    2. Re:It's only ahead of Siding Spring by a month by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      Will it have time/fuel to "duck and cover" by getting to the far side of the planet before the close approach of the comet and the potential of a cometary dust storm that could wreck it?

      While this is a non-zero probability event, it is a low probability event. I doubt that the mission planners are particularly worried about it.

      Maybe if there's a mission-compatible way of sequencing things that will reduce this low probability even further, at little cost (which is what Hubble did during a predicted Leonid meteor shower ; but the Hubble Deep Field South was already planned, and the only real change was when the exposures were scheduled. Which by coincidence pointed the HST away from the radiant of the meteor shower.)

      Incidentally I note that the mission is being monitored by the Indian Deep Space Network. Which either operates for a few hours a day (per mission, depending on direction to the spacecraft), or indicates that India has done some significant multi-national diplomacy to get their ground stations into a number of countries.

      LMGTFY. There's a Wiki page that says it's one site near Bangalore. And that mentions the use of steerable antennae to " improve[s] the visibility duration". But this site says there are a number of other tracking sites. "ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) [...] has a network of ground stations at Bangalore, Lucknow, Sriharikota, Port Blair and Thiruvananthapuram in India besides stations at Mauritius, Bearslake (Russia), Brunei and Biak (Indonesia). " So, maybe several different organisations, with overlapping missions and facilities. Like Topsy, it's probably something that "just growed".

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  5. Re:Why I Hate Indians by CrzyP · · Score: 1

    Well, that novel was extremely relevant to the OP. Thanks for psycho/analyzing the Indian people because we definitely needed it as a response to a scientific post.

  6. There's a joke here about tech support by jpellino · · Score: 1

    when the orbiter phones home, but I'm too tired at the moment to suss it out.

    --
    "Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
  7. Road side service by ilotgov · · Score: 1

    This must be the Flat Tyre Service (http://cria.co.in/crweb/flat-tyre-service/) honouring the rumoured subscription of cash-strapped NASA.
    Considering the damage (http://www.space.com/26472-mars-rover-curiosity-wheel-damage.html) there was no way Cross Roads (http://cria.co.in/crweb/) could wiggle out of it's responsibility.

  8. A little late to be planning by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

    presently busy planning to reduce the speed of the spacecraft through the process of firing the LAM engine

    I'd hope they'd have got all of the planning done before launch, and would instead be getting busy implementing.

    --
    systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
  9. Congratulations, India! by GenaTrius · · Score: 3

    I need to give Indian culture some serious study at some point, both ancient and contemporary. What little I've learned so far has been fascinating. I wouldn't be at all surprised if India surpassed the US in international prominance in a few decades.

  10. Is Mangalyaan chasing a zephyr? by Squidlips · · Score: 1

    Isn't it designed to look for Methane in Mars' atmosphere? And didn't the MSL rover (Curiousity) determine that there is no detectable methane in the air, at least at Gale, right?

    1. Re:Is Mangalyaan chasing a zephyr? by Bismuthprince · · Score: 1

      If I'm correct, methane is lighter than carbon dioxide. Isn't it possible that methane that was produced long ago has settled on top of the CO2 layer, and can't really be detected from ground level?
      I'm actually seriously asking, I have no clue.

  11. Re:Hey Indians! by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    This MOM was an acronym, obviously. (Well...I'm really not sure now how obvious it is, in retrospect.)

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
  12. As a point of information... by whitroth · · Score: 1

    Who built the rocket and spacecraft? Was it the Indian space agency, or was it built by large aerospace companies for India?

                  mark "is he suggesting that the govenment, on civil service wages, could do it cheaper?"