Ditto about it being an ESA rather than NASA mission.
However, in answer to your question, this is far from being a mission for the sake of being a mission. Some of the instruments are novel (e.g. the Fourier Spectrometer and the long-wave ground-penetrating radar) and so will produce novel data. MARSIS, in particular, will be used to search for sub-surface ice in a completely new way, which should allow the global distribution to be mapped. In addition, instruments such as the high-resolution stereo camera (HRSC) will simply produce better quality and coverage, higher resolution data than ever before, allowing much more detailed studies than ever before.
It's the long-wave radar MARSIS instrument that will be doing most of the search for water. Apparently it will be sensitive to the presence of ground-ice layers (i.e. crust where water-ice is present within the pores) at depths of upto a few km. Not only will we be able to detect water-ice, but we should also be able to quantify volumes to some extent.
Xine and Mplayer on Linux can theoretically at least use the RealPlayer codec.
The reason for RealPlayer is that there are native players available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, and that RealPlay data streams are well compressed (so that the Slashdot effect doesn't hurt too much). Many in the space industry use Unix almost exclusively, and so aren't keen to view on Windows or Mac.
MER 1 - NASA lander, launched soon MER 2 - NASA lander, launched soon Beagle 2 - ESA lander, launched recently Mars Express - ESA orbiter, launched recently Nozomi - ISIS orbiter, on route Mars Odyssey - NASA orbiter, already there Mars Gloabl Surveyor - NASA orbiter, already there
Are you forgetting Mars '96, which was launched from Baikonur and crashed into the pacific ocean? Russia's track record for Mars missions is pretty appauling; so much so that I was pretty nervous during launch. Russia have had some great successes sending missions to Venus and the Moon, but their Mars missions just keep getting lost, blowing up, crashing, etc.
As someone based in the UK but having worked in the US from time to time, I have to say that my US colleagues, at least in planetary science, spend more time writing research proposals than we do. Their proposals are simply much longer and more in-depth than UK ones; more akin to EC Framework projects. That being said, their proposals more likely to get funded, and funded well.
Agreed about the tight budget thing though. It would be nice, just for once, to have a budget that allowed me to just buy, for example, extra memory for my computer as and when I needed it.
Hi Jez - True, Beagle 2 is kind've "Better, Faster, Cheaper", but that's more because it's a U.K. mission. Looking at Mars Express, Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo, compared with other planetary missions at present, and I'd say that ESA are going in for bigger missions than just about anyone else at present. Fingers crossed for tonight. -Karl
If you have access to Astra 2C satellite reception equipment, I suggest that you link directly in to the ESA television broadcast. The quality should be better and it might help relieve the slashdot effect. The details are as follows:
Satellite:
Astra 2C at 19 degrees East
Reception frequency: 10832 MHz
Polarisation: Horizontal
Symbol rate: 22 Msymb/s
FEC: 5/6
Service ID: 61950
Service name: ESA
TXT: none
Start of launch transmission: 19:15 CEST (17:15 GMT/UT)
Most intense period of planetary exploration ever
on
Mars Express launch today
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Not only are Mars Express and Beagle 2 going to be joined by two NASA landers, but also the Japanese orbiter, Nozomi. These five missions will complement NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, launched in 1997, and Mars Odyssey, launched in 2001, which are still returning excellent data of the surface of Mars from orbit. This marks not only the beginning of the most intensive period of study of Mars in the history of space exploration, but also the start of a planetary science renaissance.
In addition to these missions, also keep an eye on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, arriving later this year, as well as ESA's SMART-1 mission to the moon to be launched soon. Future plans include NASA's Mercury Messenger, and ESA's Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo.
In addition, even visible instruments tend to be at wavelengths that are imperfectly aligned to human eyesight. The apparently true colour images produced by the Viking Orbiters in the 1970s were derived from only two wavebands (approximately blue and orange), therefore requiring some interpolation and guesswork to come up with RGB. Still, they appear to have done a pretty good job, despite initial problems (they assumed that the sky should be blue, and calibrated the colours accordingly). Anyone working with colour film scanners will have encountered the same sort of problems unless they employed professional calibration techniques.
I might be wrong, but I think that THEMIS is the first successful orbital instrument to carry a sensor (the VIS component) with 3 wavebands close to the colour receptors of the human eye (0.425 microns, 0.540 microns and 0.654 microns). Perhaps there was something on Phobos, but that hardly returned any data.
True colour is largely useless for studying geology, as rocks show more spectral variation at longer wavelengths.
For anyone that is exterested, there is an extended scientific abstract of this work, here, to be presented as a poster on Thursday evening at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. This is a serious conference (I'll be there as usual), and so we'll soon see whether this stands up to scientific scrutiny.
Having read the abstract, and work by Mike Malin (PI of the camera on Mars Global Surveyor) and co-authors, who proposed that these features were water some time ago, I think that there still needs to be more work (and more importantly, supporting evidence, e.g. spectral) before there will be a concensus that the streaks are indeed caused by water. However, the fact that there is clearly a change means that, if these are caused by water, then they are certainly VERY recent (i.e. a few years), which has profound implications. The question would then need to be asked, is the water flow due to an active hydrological system caused by climatic and orbital change, or is it related to volcanic/hydrothermal processes? The latter seems unlikely as there is no evidence, to my mind, of an unusual thermal anomaly in the vicinity of Olympus Mons. Also, there are streaks like this in many other areas of Mars. However, it may be possible to set up a hydrothermal system without an easily detectable thermal anomaly - I don't know for sure. I'll try to ask the author what she thinks next week.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Scientist, Lancaster University, U.K.
That is most certainly not plagiarism of Hoagland. For starters, the images in Hoagland's research were of a completely different area. Secondly, Hoagland's "research" was actually derived directly from work by Mike Malin and others (the people that run the camera system on Mars Global Surveyor) which was published years before Hoagland's report. Thirdly, Hoagland didn't clearly identify sequential images of the same area. His premise, that these were extremely recent water flow, doesn't go much beyond Malin's, except that Hoagland makes the extra jump of saying that they are "extremely recent", which appears to be based upon the old "it looks like this so it is this" argument that was used for the Face on Mars.
Plagiarism is an extremely nasty word to bandy about in a scientific sense, and is probably about the worst insult you could give to a scientist. I would suggest that you restrict its use to when you can prove it.
I agree. This headline is definitely jumping the gun, which is beneath what I usually expect of the BBC. Clearly that there is change on the surface is interesting. However, there are alternative explanations to water, such as a debris flow, due to slope collapse, exposing materials in a different oxidation state, which need further investigation.
This is also research that has, to my knowledge, not been peer-reviewed. Tahirih Motazedian is a planetary scientist that I have never met or heard of before. I think she is a student or a junior RA, not that that means anything in itself. It certainly must have taken some degree of dedication to sift through all of the overlapping images to look for such change, and that should be applauded.
This work is being presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston next week (click here for an abstract), and so we'll soon see if it bears up to scrutiny (I'll be there). At a first glance, the abstract seems to make perfect sense, but it would need some sort of supporting evidence (possibly using multi-spectral THEMIS data) before convincing me.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Scientist, Lancaster University, U.K.
First of all, the only (potentially atmosphere forming) volatile elements observed in abundance on Mars are water and carbon dioxide. These are also the main two elements supplied by volcanism to the atmosphere from the mantle.
Secondly, carbon dioxide boils like crazy at all plausible atmospheric pressures and temperatures for Mars. Current Martian atmospheric pressure is about 600 Pa, which is sufficient to boil away a standing body of water at a few millimetres per second, or a standing body of carbon dioxide at a few metres per second. The channels observed on Mars are carved by fairly long lived (hours to years) floods, whereas CO2 would only really be capable of creating small floods before boiling away, and might actually look somewhat more like craters.
So, basically, water is the only viable material. There are many other reasons, but I find that one usually works.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Science Research Group, Environmental Science Dept., Lancaster University, U.K.
It's not quite as simple as whether or not Martian gravity is strong enough to hold on to the atmosphere. Both the Earth and Mars lose gas particles to space. The question is as to whether you can replenish them or not. Volcanism is the main way of recharging the atmosphere, by bringing water, CO2 and other volatiles to the surface. As far as we can tell, Mars is not volcanically active and so therefore there is a net loss. However, it has never been established that Mars is actually volcanically extinct. It has almost certainly been active within the last billion years, which is not all that long ago geologically speaking. There is some fairly good evidence that the last activity was in the last few millions or tens of millions of years, which is extremely recent. Unfortunately it looks like Martian volcanism is episodic over many millions of years, however, and so we might not actually see anything within many lifetimes, even if Mars isn't volcanically dead.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell
Research Associate
Planetary Science Research Group
Environmental Science Dept.
Lancaster University, U.K.
There are Europa missions on the drawing board, but none have got support yet. Hopefully this will change over the next few years. I doubt that support will come from NASA during the Bush administration however, as they only seem to be interested in Mars.
Some of you have been asking about Japanese missions to the moon. The Japanese sent their first test mission to the moon as early as 1980. It eventually crashed into the lunar surface in 1993 after 13 years. I don't think anything has been launched since then, but the next mission is planned for 2005 after several delays. The following is sourced from NASA's NSSDC (National Space Science Data Centre):
---
Hiten (a.k.a. Muses-A)
Lunar Orbiter and Lander
Launch Period: 1980
Agency: ISAS - Japan
Hiten (originally called Muses-A) was an ISAS (Japanese Space Agency) Earth orbiting satellite designed primarily to test and verify technologies for future lunar and planetary missions. The spacecraft carried a small satellite named Hagoromo which was released into orbit around the Moon. Hiten itself was put into a highly elliptical Earth orbit which passed by the Moon ten times during the mission, which ended when Hiten was intentionally crashed into the Moon on 10 April 1993. The primary objectives of the mission were to: 1) test trajectory control utilizing gravity assist double lunar swingbys; 2) insert a sub-satellite into lunar orbit; 3) conduct optical navigation experiments on a spin-stabilized spacecraft; 4) test fault tolerant onboard computer and packet telemetry; 5) conduct cis-lunar aerobraking experiments; and 6) detect and measure mass and velocity of micro-meteorite particles. Three follow-on objectives were also added: excursion to the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Earth-Moon system, orbit of the Hiten spacecraft around the Moon, and hard landing on the lunar surface. Hiten was named after a flying, music-playing Buddhist angel. Hagoromo was named for the veil worn by Hiten. This mission included Japan's first-ever lunar flyby, lunar orbiter, and lunar surface impact.
Selene(SELenological and ENgineering Explorer)
Lunar Orbiter and Lander
Launch Period: 2005
Agency: ISAS, NASDA - Japan
Selene will carry 13 instruments including imagers, a radar sounder, laser altimeter, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and gamma-ray spectrometer to study the origin, evolution, and tectonics of the Moon from orbit. The 2000 kg launch-mass spacecraft will be carried by an H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center. The spacecraft consists of three separate units: the main orbiter, a small relay satellite, and a small VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) satellite. The orbiter is a rectangular box carrying the scientific instrumentation, measures about 2.1 m by 4.2 m, and has a mass of roughly 1600 kg. The relay satellite is an octagonal prism and will be used to transmit communications from the orbiter to Earth. The VLBI satellite is the same shape as the relay satellite and will be used to conduct precise investigations on the position and precession of the Moon.
Selene will take 5 days to reach the Moon, where it will be put into an initial 120 x 13000 km orbit at an inclination of 95 degrees. The relay satellite will be released into a 100 x 2400 km orbit and then the VLBI satellite will be released into a 100 x 800 km orbit. The orbiter will then be lowered to its nominal 100 km circular orbit. Selene will carry out observations for approximately one year.
---
The Japanese plan many more planetary missions, including a 2007 Venus orbiter called Planet-C. This will be extremely valuable to planetary scientists, providing the international community with a huge amount of novel data, including optical observations of the surface through the narrow 1 micron NIR window in the atmosphere. This should allow unambiguous identification of active volcanism, unlike all previous USSR/US attempts.
I'm probably inviting major flames here, but could we stop the curry/7-11/etc. comments? They're getting extremely repetitive and could be considered quite offensive/racist. India, as a nation, has given the world many wonderful things, and these sorts of blinkered stereotypes do no-one any favours.
I admit that there is a difference in scale, but the comparison is valid. What I was trying to point out is that there are poverty issues, as well as corruption and, in some cases, hunger, in other countries around the world, but that doesn't cause, for example, the US government to divert money from research and development to poverty issues. Even if the money was diverted from their one lunar mission, it would make hardly any difference to the hundreds of millions in poverty in India (I wonder if the same could be said of the US or European space exploration programmes?). However, if there is any slight economic benefit, this could make a huge difference.
It's true that India could invest this money in dealing with poverty, hunger, corruption, etc. However, these are problems with the US, UK, Russia and pretty much every other country in the world too. In fact, taking it even further, one could argue that all of these other countries are polarised too. I think of all those poor souls without health care in the US for example. This doesn't stop the US government from spending a fortune on NASA.
It is the nature of government to want to spend money on development of new technology, ideas, etc., perhaps as a way of improving the status of the nation, which in turn can have economic and social benefits. Maybe it is wrong to do this at the expense of the poor, but governments normally don't balance their books in such a way. Inequality in society is not just due to governments spending too much on these sorts of activity. It is about the inherent characteristics of that society and, in capitalist countries, this means big inequalities.
In principal I would prefer to see the Indian government spend more money on eradicating policy rather than reaching the moon. However, I don't think the government would see these as opposite sides of the same coin. I also think it would be a shame if scientific and technical endeavours ended within India, and many of its thinkers, scientists, etc. have contributed significantly to global knowledge.
Has there been anything send further from Earth and returned safely?
No. I'm not sure, but I think that record is currently set by the Apollo missions.
I'd think that the parts of the spacecraft that return should have a place in the Smithsonian.
Agreed.
-Karl
P.S. I'm afraid I can't help with the battery problem question. I wasn't following the mission at the time. I can't find any reference to it on the website.
Slashdot Mirror
However, in answer to your question, this is far from being a mission for the sake of being a mission. Some of the instruments are novel (e.g. the Fourier Spectrometer and the long-wave ground-penetrating radar) and so will produce novel data. MARSIS, in particular, will be used to search for sub-surface ice in a completely new way, which should allow the global distribution to be mapped. In addition, instruments such as the high-resolution stereo camera (HRSC) will simply produce better quality and coverage, higher resolution data than ever before, allowing much more detailed studies than ever before.
-Karl
It's the long-wave radar MARSIS instrument that will be doing most of the search for water. Apparently it will be sensitive to the presence of ground-ice layers (i.e. crust where water-ice is present within the pores) at depths of upto a few km. Not only will we be able to detect water-ice, but we should also be able to quantify volumes to some extent.
Re: Venus, ESA are planning a Venus Express mission, re-using most of the spare components of Mars Express, to be launched in 2005. More details are at http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fa reaid=64.
Xine and Mplayer on Linux can theoretically at least use the RealPlayer codec.
The reason for RealPlayer is that there are native players available for Windows, MacOS and Linux, and that RealPlay data streams are well compressed (so that the Slashdot effect doesn't hurt too much). Many in the space industry use Unix almost exclusively, and so aren't keen to view on Windows or Mac.
So, there are seven:
MER 1 - NASA lander, launched soon
MER 2 - NASA lander, launched soon
Beagle 2 - ESA lander, launched recently
Mars Express - ESA orbiter, launched recently
Nozomi - ISIS orbiter, on route
Mars Odyssey - NASA orbiter, already there
Mars Gloabl Surveyor - NASA orbiter, already there
Quite an impressible armada, don't you think?
There is a stereo camera on Beagle 2. There were also two cameras on Mars Pathfinder which were used to produce stereo panoramas.
Are you forgetting Mars '96, which was launched from Baikonur and crashed into the pacific ocean? Russia's track record for Mars missions is pretty appauling; so much so that I was pretty nervous during launch. Russia have had some great successes sending missions to Venus and the Moon, but their Mars missions just keep getting lost, blowing up, crashing, etc.
The launch went fine. MEx is in Earth orbit. The first major maneuver will be at 20:15 GMT/UT.
Cost. The budget was extremely tight and Russia launch cheaper than ESA, even for ESA-run missions. It's a pretty strange state of affairs.
Agreed about the tight budget thing though. It would be nice, just for once, to have a budget that allowed me to just buy, for example, extra memory for my computer as and when I needed it.
Hi Jez - True, Beagle 2 is kind've "Better, Faster, Cheaper", but that's more because it's a U.K. mission. Looking at Mars Express, Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo, compared with other planetary missions at present, and I'd say that ESA are going in for bigger missions than just about anyone else at present. Fingers crossed for tonight. -Karl
Reception frequency: 10832 MHz
Polarisation: Horizontal
Symbol rate: 22 Msymb/s
FEC: 5/6
Service ID: 61950
Service name: ESA
TXT: none
Start of launch transmission: 19:15 CEST (17:15 GMT/UT)
In addition to these missions, also keep an eye on the NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, arriving later this year, as well as ESA's SMART-1 mission to the moon to be launched soon. Future plans include NASA's Mercury Messenger, and ESA's Venus Express and Bepi-Columbo.
In addition, even visible instruments tend to be at wavelengths that are imperfectly aligned to human eyesight. The apparently true colour images produced by the Viking Orbiters in the 1970s were derived from only two wavebands (approximately blue and orange), therefore requiring some interpolation and guesswork to come up with RGB. Still, they appear to have done a pretty good job, despite initial problems (they assumed that the sky should be blue, and calibrated the colours accordingly). Anyone working with colour film scanners will have encountered the same sort of problems unless they employed professional calibration techniques.
I might be wrong, but I think that THEMIS is the first successful orbital instrument to carry a sensor (the VIS component) with 3 wavebands close to the colour receptors of the human eye (0.425 microns, 0.540 microns and 0.654 microns). Perhaps there was something on Phobos, but that hardly returned any data.
True colour is largely useless for studying geology, as rocks show more spectral variation at longer wavelengths.
For anyone that is exterested, there is an extended scientific abstract of this work, here, to be presented as a poster on Thursday evening at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas. This is a serious conference (I'll be there as usual), and so we'll soon see whether this stands up to scientific scrutiny.
Having read the abstract, and work by Mike Malin (PI of the camera on Mars Global Surveyor) and co-authors, who proposed that these features were water some time ago, I think that there still needs to be more work (and more importantly, supporting evidence, e.g. spectral) before there will be a concensus that the streaks are indeed caused by water. However, the fact that there is clearly a change means that, if these are caused by water, then they are certainly VERY recent (i.e. a few years), which has profound implications. The question would then need to be asked, is the water flow due to an active hydrological system caused by climatic and orbital change, or is it related to volcanic/hydrothermal processes? The latter seems unlikely as there is no evidence, to my mind, of an unusual thermal anomaly in the vicinity of Olympus Mons. Also, there are streaks like this in many other areas of Mars. However, it may be possible to set up a hydrothermal system without an easily detectable thermal anomaly - I don't know for sure. I'll try to ask the author what she thinks next week.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Scientist, Lancaster University, U.K.
That is most certainly not plagiarism of Hoagland. For starters, the images in Hoagland's research were of a completely different area. Secondly, Hoagland's "research" was actually derived directly from work by Mike Malin and others (the people that run the camera system on Mars Global Surveyor) which was published years before Hoagland's report. Thirdly, Hoagland didn't clearly identify sequential images of the same area. His premise, that these were extremely recent water flow, doesn't go much beyond Malin's, except that Hoagland makes the extra jump of saying that they are "extremely recent", which appears to be based upon the old "it looks like this so it is this" argument that was used for the Face on Mars.
Plagiarism is an extremely nasty word to bandy about in a scientific sense, and is probably about the worst insult you could give to a scientist. I would suggest that you restrict its use to when you can prove it.
-Karl
I agree. This headline is definitely jumping the gun, which is beneath what I usually expect of the BBC. Clearly that there is change on the surface is interesting. However, there are alternative explanations to water, such as a debris flow, due to slope collapse, exposing materials in a different oxidation state, which need further investigation.
This is also research that has, to my knowledge, not been peer-reviewed. Tahirih Motazedian is a planetary scientist that I have never met or heard of before. I think she is a student or a junior RA, not that that means anything in itself. It certainly must have taken some degree of dedication to sift through all of the overlapping images to look for such change, and that should be applauded.
This work is being presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston next week (click here for an abstract), and so we'll soon see if it bears up to scrutiny (I'll be there). At a first glance, the abstract seems to make perfect sense, but it would need some sort of supporting evidence (possibly using multi-spectral THEMIS data) before convincing me. -Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Scientist, Lancaster University, U.K.
I can give a quick answer to that:
First of all, the only (potentially atmosphere forming) volatile elements observed in abundance on Mars are water and carbon dioxide. These are also the main two elements supplied by volcanism to the atmosphere from the mantle.
Secondly, carbon dioxide boils like crazy at all plausible atmospheric pressures and temperatures for Mars. Current Martian atmospheric pressure is about 600 Pa, which is sufficient to boil away a standing body of water at a few millimetres per second, or a standing body of carbon dioxide at a few metres per second. The channels observed on Mars are carved by fairly long lived (hours to years) floods, whereas CO2 would only really be capable of creating small floods before boiling away, and might actually look somewhat more like craters.
So, basically, water is the only viable material. There are many other reasons, but I find that one usually works.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell, Planetary Science Research Group, Environmental Science Dept., Lancaster University, U.K.
-Karl
Dr Karl Mitchell
Research Associate
Planetary Science Research Group
Environmental Science Dept.
Lancaster University, U.K.
There are Europa missions on the drawing board, but none have got support yet. Hopefully this will change over the next few years. I doubt that support will come from NASA during the Bush administration however, as they only seem to be interested in Mars.
---
Hiten (a.k.a. Muses-A)
Lunar Orbiter and Lander
Launch Period: 1980
Agency: ISAS - Japan
Hiten (originally called Muses-A) was an ISAS (Japanese Space Agency) Earth orbiting satellite designed primarily to test and verify technologies for future lunar and planetary missions. The spacecraft carried a small satellite named Hagoromo which was released into orbit around the Moon. Hiten itself was put into a highly elliptical Earth orbit which passed by the Moon ten times during the mission, which ended when Hiten was intentionally crashed into the Moon on 10 April 1993. The primary objectives of the mission were to: 1) test trajectory control utilizing gravity assist double lunar swingbys; 2) insert a sub-satellite into lunar orbit; 3) conduct optical navigation experiments on a spin-stabilized spacecraft; 4) test fault tolerant onboard computer and packet telemetry; 5) conduct cis-lunar aerobraking experiments; and 6) detect and measure mass and velocity of micro-meteorite particles. Three follow-on objectives were also added: excursion to the L4 and L5 Lagrangian points of the Earth-Moon system, orbit of the Hiten spacecraft around the Moon, and hard landing on the lunar surface. Hiten was named after a flying, music-playing Buddhist angel. Hagoromo was named for the veil worn by Hiten. This mission included Japan's first-ever lunar flyby, lunar orbiter, and lunar surface impact.
Selene (SELenological and ENgineering Explorer)
Lunar Orbiter and Lander
Launch Period: 2005
Agency: ISAS, NASDA - Japan
Selene will carry 13 instruments including imagers, a radar sounder, laser altimeter, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer and gamma-ray spectrometer to study the origin, evolution, and tectonics of the Moon from orbit. The 2000 kg launch-mass spacecraft will be carried by an H-2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center. The spacecraft consists of three separate units: the main orbiter, a small relay satellite, and a small VLBI (Very Long Baseline Interferometry) satellite. The orbiter is a rectangular box carrying the scientific instrumentation, measures about 2.1 m by 4.2 m, and has a mass of roughly 1600 kg. The relay satellite is an octagonal prism and will be used to transmit communications from the orbiter to Earth. The VLBI satellite is the same shape as the relay satellite and will be used to conduct precise investigations on the position and precession of the Moon.
Selene will take 5 days to reach the Moon, where it will be put into an initial 120 x 13000 km orbit at an inclination of 95 degrees. The relay satellite will be released into a 100 x 2400 km orbit and then the VLBI satellite will be released into a 100 x 800 km orbit. The orbiter will then be lowered to its nominal 100 km circular orbit. Selene will carry out observations for approximately one year.
---
The Japanese plan many more planetary missions, including a 2007 Venus orbiter called Planet-C. This will be extremely valuable to planetary scientists, providing the international community with a huge amount of novel data, including optical observations of the surface through the narrow 1 micron NIR window in the atmosphere. This should allow unambiguous identification of active volcanism, unlike all previous USSR/US attempts.
-Karl
I'm probably inviting major flames here, but could we stop the curry/7-11/etc. comments? They're getting extremely repetitive and could be considered quite offensive/racist. India, as a nation, has given the world many wonderful things, and these sorts of blinkered stereotypes do no-one any favours.
I admit that there is a difference in scale, but the comparison is valid. What I was trying to point out is that there are poverty issues, as well as corruption and, in some cases, hunger, in other countries around the world, but that doesn't cause, for example, the US government to divert money from research and development to poverty issues. Even if the money was diverted from their one lunar mission, it would make hardly any difference to the hundreds of millions in poverty in India (I wonder if the same could be said of the US or European space exploration programmes?). However, if there is any slight economic benefit, this could make a huge difference.
It's true that India could invest this money in dealing with poverty, hunger, corruption, etc. However, these are problems with the US, UK, Russia and pretty much every other country in the world too. In fact, taking it even further, one could argue that all of these other countries are polarised too. I think of all those poor souls without health care in the US for example. This doesn't stop the US government from spending a fortune on NASA.
It is the nature of government to want to spend money on development of new technology, ideas, etc., perhaps as a way of improving the status of the nation, which in turn can have economic and social benefits. Maybe it is wrong to do this at the expense of the poor, but governments normally don't balance their books in such a way. Inequality in society is not just due to governments spending too much on these sorts of activity. It is about the inherent characteristics of that society and, in capitalist countries, this means big inequalities.
In principal I would prefer to see the Indian government spend more money on eradicating policy rather than reaching the moon. However, I don't think the government would see these as opposite sides of the same coin. I also think it would be a shame if scientific and technical endeavours ended within India, and many of its thinkers, scientists, etc. have contributed significantly to global knowledge.
No. I'm not sure, but I think that record is currently set by the Apollo missions.
I'd think that the parts of the spacecraft that return should have a place in the Smithsonian.
Agreed.
-Karl
P.S. I'm afraid I can't help with the battery problem question. I wasn't following the mission at the time. I can't find any reference to it on the website.