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Mangalyaan Successfully Put Into Mars Orbit

Posted by Soulskill on from the congratulations-to-all-involved dept.

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.

18 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by Great+Big+Bird · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Could it be they succeeded in part because much of the previous experience? Either way, great job doing it on their first attempt and cheapest.

    1. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by asliarun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Could it be they succeeded in part because much of the previous experience?

      Either way, great job doing it on their first attempt and cheapest.

      Yes, but mostly no. What you say would be valid if firstly, research details (and the real nitty gritty details) would be shared freely - like open source. And to my (admittedly limited) knowledge, it is not. Yes, scientific papers and research is shared, but this is largely an engineering problem, not a scientific problem. And everyone pretty much needs to figure out the engineering challenges by themselves.

      What you say would also be true (as is true in the high tech industry, for example) if sufficient people changed jobs back and forth between organizations like NASA and ISRO. To my knowledge, ISRO works on a shoestring budget and is a fairly insular work environment. Hardly any scientists or engineers quit a NASA job to join ISRO. I could be wrong though, but I would be very very surprised if there was indeed a reverse brain drain.

      If anything, the brain drain consists of India's best and brightest relocating to the US after having studied in the near-free subsidized taxpayer funded colleges and universities in India. They typically go to the US to do their masters and PhD and then some of them join NASA.

      ISRO is actually a fairly old and mature organization. India's scientific programs, especially in the high-tech space (and especially rocketry) suffered enormously because of high-tech blockade enforced by the US. The blockade was to the extent that even simple multi-core computers were banned from being exported to India. (That's why India tried to design its own supercomputer back in the day - the Param).

      I know it may sound like I am being hyperbolic about ISRO but they actually deserve double credit for all the sh*t they had to put up with, and still managed to set ridiculous goals like this, and then achieving it, and that too on a shoestring budget and being able to retain their talent that gets paid Indian govt salaries. Trust me, that is not much. Forget about Indian pride etc. What is worth understanding is how organizations like this continue to succeed in the face of such big challenges.

    2. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by itzly · · Score: 4, Funny

      "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I was standing on their glasses" -- Isaac Newton.

    3. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not to be rude (kudos ISRO regardless of all this nitpicking!), but even without hardcore information dumps from NASA, the fact remains that ISRO's attempt, coming so much later than the other three nations' first attempts, invariably benefits from the enormous pace of global scientific and technological advancement in the interim.

      The first successes (after initial failures) of the US and Russian Mars programs came back in 1964 and 1971, respectively. I mean, forget the modern Internet and iPhones and all that for a moment.... personal computers as awesome as the Altair 8800 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800 ) were still years away from being available. Can you imagine living in a world where that Altair 8800 was too badass to even exist yet, and launching a successful Mars mission? The NASA engineers in the 50's and 60's were working with caveman technology compared to what *anyone*, even ISRO, has access to today.

      So I still contend: it's not very fair to gloat about ISRO making it on the first try *now* vs other first-failures, when the other first-failures were so long ago.

    4. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by akozakie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nitpicking is fun, so I'll have a go.

      This is true, first missions used caveman technology compared to what is available now. 20+ years later is a completely different matter, right? That would be the 90s. Great, succesful missions like Mars Observer, Mars Polar Lander or Mars Climate Orbiter? Oh, wait...

      Over 20 years of technology moving forward did not make it easy for NASA to reach Mars. 20 more would not make it that much easier for the first-timer - a bit cheaper, perhaps. This is really an impressive accomplishment.

    5. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by asliarun · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not to be rude (kudos ISRO regardless of all this nitpicking!), but even without hardcore information dumps from NASA, the fact remains that ISRO's attempt, coming so much later than the other three nations' first attempts, invariably benefits from the enormous pace of global scientific and technological advancement in the interim.

      The first successes (after initial failures) of the US and Russian Mars programs came back in 1964 and 1971, respectively. I mean, forget the modern Internet and iPhones and all that for a moment.... personal computers as awesome as the Altair 8800 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) were still years away from being available. Can you imagine living in a world where that Altair 8800 was too badass to even exist yet, and launching a successful Mars mission? The NASA engineers in the 50's and 60's were working with caveman technology compared to what *anyone*, even ISRO, has access to today.

      So I still contend: it's not very fair to gloat about ISRO making it on the first try *now* vs other first-failures, when the other first-failures were so long ago.

      For sure. NASA and the Russian equivalent have been the pioneers in space exploration. No questions about that.

      Nonetheless, after the Cold War fueled space race fizzled out.. and it has been a couple of decades now, hardly anyone is doing anything worthwhile as far as space exploration is concerned. You will probably admit that we have regressed more than we have made progress. With this in light, it is creditable that an underfunded organization like ISRO got this funded and successfully executed.

      And let's also face the face that India is still a terribly poor country. The pursuit of science is indeed part of its value system that probably that fact alone caused ISRO to survive all these years. And ISRO has also been releasing satellites since 1975 (Aryabhata), although they only got launch capability fairly recently (1993). And admittedly, the state of the art wasn't that evolved in 1975 either.

      For sure, this is only a "proof of concept" kind of a launch, but the thing is - it now sets some new benchmarks in terms of cost, capability, scale of ambition, and execution. You can push something to Mars in 75 mil. That is pretty frickin sweet. And if you are going to talk about hype and hyperbole, look at the media coverage and hype that SpaceX and Virgin Galactic has been getting. Why begrudge ISRO their moment in the spotlight?

    6. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by William+Robinson · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Most certainly ISRO must have gained a lot from previous mission whether succesful or failures and most certainly ISRO must have access to better technology. But that does not undermine the efforts of ISRO scientists.

      You need to recall that China's mission failed in 2011, and read your arguments/nitpicking again. China's failure in 2011 simply implies that with all the advantages you mentioned, MARS mission is still a challange. And ISRO needs to be praised for what they achieved.

      --
      hilarious
    7. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by KingOfGondor · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    8. Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants by YA_Python_dev · · Score: 4, Informative

      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__()
  2. The first attempt by Champaklal · · Score: 3

    European Space Agency was the first to do it right in first attempt. India is the first country to do so, and ISRO, second organization. We can expect to read more on the composition and presence of water by studying Hydrogen and Deuterium (Heavy isotope of Hydrogen with at. mass 2) in martian atmosphere. Mostly the atmosphere of mars would be extremely rare even at the closest point. The Karman line of Mars (the limit beyond which atmosphere is assumed to have ended and space is assumed to have started) should be close to 65 Kms. I'm not sure Lyman alpha camera would be able to compute the presence.

  3. Congratulations to India and everyone involved by Harlequin80 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The more information we as a species can gather about other planets and travelling through space can only help us all in the future.

    To have achieved this at the cost they have means far more experiments performed and more sensors launched.

    Congratulations.

  4. Impressive, but probably not that cheap. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I suspect that the "true cost" is somewhat higher than the quoted 74M. For instance, how many spares from Chandrayaan did they use? One should always be suspicious of major spaceflight operations that claim unusually low cost or unusually fast times, because most of the time they are leveraging pre-existing assets. For instance, most flight hardware components (computers, radios, antennas) have 2-3 year manufacturing lead times: it takes that amount of time to go through the design review process, acquire the appropriate components, assemble the widget, run it through the shake and bake environmental tests, etc.
    If you're doing a first mission that needs, say, 2 radios, and you buy 2 plus a couple spares, and you make it through the qualification program and none fell out, you now have two perfectly good radios sitting on the shelf ready to go. But it's not really fair to claim those as being cost free, nor not contributing the schedule.

    However, in general, well done to the Indian team.

  5. Innovations out of the MoM or Mangalyaan by rinka · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  6. Kudos to PM Modi as well... by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Nice of the PM to visit and sit in on the last stage of the journey, putting science and scientists in the spotlight. Over here (NL) we hardly ever celebrate scientific successes, and accomplished scientists receive less attention and recognition from politicians than sports heroes.

    --
    If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
  7. With a budget of 74M ,,, by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 3, Funny

    ... I wonder what NASA can do with a budget of $74 million ...
     
    ... hmm .....

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:With a budget of 74M ,,, by Cornwallis · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm sure they *might* be able to put together a little website with some animated cartoons of rockets. (Prolly end up having to get it redone after it fails to launch properly.)

  8. Mangalyaan in English by Champaklal · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  9. Kudos to PM Modi as well... by palemantle · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Nice of the PM to visit and sit in on the last stage of the journey, putting science and scientists in the spotlight. Over here (NL) we hardly ever celebrate scientific successes, and accomplished scientists receive less attention and recognition from politicians than sports heroes.

    Indeed, the Indian PM also tried to put this into perspective vis-a-vis sports wins with the following quote:
    "This achievement is far greater than a cricket win"

    (Source: http://www.thehindu.com/sci-te...)