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Mangalyaan Successfully Put Into Mars Orbit
knwny writes: India's Mars satellite Mangalyaan was successfully placed into orbit around Mars early on Wednesday following a 10-month journey from Earth. India thus joins the U.S., the European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union in having successfully completed a Mars mission. It is, however, the only one to have done so on the first attempt. Headed by the Indian space agency ISRO, Mangalyaan was made in 15 months at a cost of just around 74 million USD — the cheapest inter-planetary mission ever to be undertaken.
There have been significant innovations brought to the global space efforts by Mangalyaan. These innovations are the ones that cut the costs of the Mars initiative to $75M.
There have been innovations in planning, management and execution. The key ones have been a strategic focus on component reuse and leveraging other ongoing space missions within ISRO to concurrently complete tasks for Mangalyaan (:-) Isro folks hate the nickname). The whole project was planned in detail and completely schedule driven. Mangalyaan took 18 months from Mission announcement to lift-off. http://www.forbes.com/sites/sa...
The other major innovation was in terms of software modelling & simulation of the entire mission. Physical tests were made redundant on a scale never done before - just one prototype was needed. This cut waste, time & costs significantly.
ISRO chose a longer route but the slingshotting technique paid off in terms of far lesser fuel consumption (thus reducing the weight of the space craft) and yet took approximately the same time as the Maven.
Low manpower costs also helped.
I would think the payoffs to the global space community are in terms of cutting edge techniques developed. Collaboration with the Indian industry have helped build next-gen capability which will pay off in the years to come.
The Mom, a Technology demonstrator is a product of Jugaad or Frugal Engineering. The next mission is scheduled for sometime in 2017-2020. More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
A small trivia- Mangalyaan is a Hindi compound word (in Sanskrit like languages, you can join two words) which means Mangal = Mars and Yaan meaning vehicle. A simple and effective name!
You are being pedantic. By your standards, nothing would exist until a Latin word for it is not coined. A university, very loosely defined, is a meeting place for scholars and students, and one consisting of a formalized or semi-formalized rite of passage. By that definition, India had multiple universities from the early Buddhist era (4th century BCE) onwards. Taxila and Nalanda were two of the most famous ones, which had visiting scholars from as far abroad as China.
BTW, both the article and the summary are wrong: Europe too succeeded in their first attempt, with Mars Express in 2003.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()