India Makes History as Satellite Enters Mars Orbit

[rhoenix]

India has nailed its first foray into interplanetary travel. Wednesday morning local time, scientists announced that their Mangalyaan – Hindi for "Mars Craft" – had entered Mars orbit after completing the 400-million-mile arc to Mars it began last November. It will now set about collecting imagery and data that might shed light on the still mysterious red planet.

The Times of India describes the nail-biting final moments breathlessly:

Indian Space Research Organisation's Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft started orbiting the red planet at 7.47am, but it was only 12 minutes later —because of a time delay in radio signals travelling the 680 million km — that scientists at Isro Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network in Bangalore, could erupt in joy as Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood a happy witness.

For most of the time the main engine was firing — 20 of the 24 crucial minutes — MOM was hiding behind Mars, adding to the suspense.

The scientists had waited for more than 300 days as MOM journeyed on through space, but the last 54 minutes were virtually unbearable. For, it was during this period that the orbiter first reoriented itself and then fired its engine and thrusters for about 24 minutes to get into the Mars orbit.

For all the action at the ground station, there was not much the scientists had to do. More than 10 days ago, they had uplinked all the commands for the manoeuvres to the spacecraft. MOM, like an obedient child, carried them out perfectly.

MOM, as the Mission Orbiter Mars is affectionately known, cost India approximately $70 million which makes it the thriftiest mission to Mars yet and, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi has taken to pointing out, cheaper than producing the movie Gravity.

With this success, India joins an elite league of Martian explorers that includes United States, the European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union. But more valuably, India has proven it can conduct complex missions and act as a global launch pad for commercial, navigational and research satellites.

"History has been created today, we have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved the near impossible," PM Modi said. "We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and imagination. We have navigated our spacecraft through a route known to very few."

You know... I have to say Modi has a point. They spent less on their entire mission to Mars ($70 million) than it costs to make the movie Gravity, and as the article states, it went off without a single hitch.

In fact, I'd be willing to bet that's less than most movies cost lately to get made lately, and that in turn says a few pointed things about our spending priorities as a country - but that's my sullen inner NASA fanboy talking.

[rhoenix]

If India’s Mangalyaan space probe successfully enters an orbit around Mars on Wednesday, the country will have made history – twice.

It will be the only nation so far to reach Mars on its first attempt. It will also have spent the least amount of money to do so.

India’s Mars mission has a price tag of about $74 million, a fraction of the $671 million cost of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s latest Mars program.

A success would be an important advertisement for a business India hopes to enter: sending satellites and spacecraft aloft at a fraction of the cost of U.S. and European competitors.

In June, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi boasted that India has spent less to reach Mars than Hollywood producers spent on the movie “Gravity,” which cost $100 million to make.

To hold costs down, India relied on technologies it has used before and kept the size of the payload small, at 15 kilograms. It saved on fuel by using a smaller rocket to put its spacecraft into Earth orbit first to gain enough momentum to slingshot it toward Mars.

“India has cheap indigenous technology,” said Ajey Lele, a researcher at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, a New Delhi think-tank. He said cost-saving innovations “came out of sheer necessity.”

The Indian Space Research Organization has always operated on a shoe-string budget. In its early days, space scientists worked out of an abandoned church near its first launch pad.

Later, after India carried out nuclear-weapons tests, other countries refused to share their technical know-how, limiting India’s access to sophisticated technology. “India had no option but to develop its own,” said Mr. Lele.

Today, India spends $1.2 billion a year on its space program. In comparison, NASA has a budget of $17.5 billion for the year ending Sept. 30.

Some critics say India, a country where more than 300 million people live on less than $1.25 a day, should concentrate more on terrestrial issues. Others argue that the space program will help to fight poverty and boost development by driving innovation in communications services and meteorological forecasting for the country’s largely agricultural economy.

On Monday, ISRO successfully test-fired the main liquid engine of its Mars orbiter, a crucial maneuver ahead of its planned entry into the orbit of the red planet on Wednesday.

Kopillil Radhakrishnan, chairman of ISRO, told television news channel NDTV that scientists had kept costs down using “novel” approaches.

Going around the Earth and raising the spacecraft’s orbit using a propulsion system rather than relying on a heavy launch vehicle lowered the overall cost of the mission, Mr. Radhakrishnan said.

Comparatively low salaries in India also helped reduce the outlay for the voyage, which was mounted at a lower cost than missions undertaken by Russia, the European Space Agency and Japan, which each spent more than $100 million on their attempts.

Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, senior fellow in space-security studies at the Observer Research Foundation, said “a mid-level official at ISRO would be on about 100,000 rupees ($1,644) a month.”

Out of 51 missions to Mars, only three space agencies – in Russia, the U.S. and Europe — have succeeded.

India, which currently has around 35 satellites in Earth orbit for communication, television broadcasting and remote sensing, last year launched its first military satellite to gather naval intelligence.

Overall, India has launched more than 50 satellites since 1975, according to ISRO. The country is gaining increasing recognition worldwide as a low-cost option for sending satellites into orbit.

In June, ISRO put five foreign satellites into space in a single launch. The main cargo was Spot-7, a high-resolution Earth- observation satellite belonging to European consortium Airbus Defence & Space Co. It also carried four other smaller satellites: one each from the German Aerospace Center and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and two from the Space Flight Laboratory at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in Canada.

In 2008, India launched Tecsar–an Israeli spy satellite—to monitor the movements of the Iranian military.

The global space market was pegged at $304.31 billion in 2012, the latest year for which data are available, according to the Space Foundation, a U.S.-based research group.

The more interesting part about this article is that it seems to suggest that India is attempting to position itself as a "low-cost alternative" to other agencies and countries, in terms of cost to put things into Earth's orbit. With the track record they have thus far, they appear to be well positioned to do just that.

[Josh]

I find it rather more heartening that space is getting so relatively 'cheap' nowadays.

We've always prioritized entertainment with huge outlays, it's pretty common throughout history. I'd love to see more investment in big-ass space projects, but give it time. We're so much better than we were in the late eighties/nineties when everyone was carping about wasting money on stupid space projects. We've actually got momentum, and it just might carry us to planting a flag on Mars.

[Batman]

Who knows? There, it might actually flap someday. Well one of its successors at any rate.
Of course at this rate one wonders whose flag it's actually gonna be.

[Josh]

Honestly I don't care too much about who gets there first. I love that there's competition again, it's what was direly needed.

The important part is that we keep pushing onward and working toward getting significant off-planet population centers eventually. In this matter, my first concern is the proliferation and survivable distribution of the human species and whichever transient nation state gets bragging rights is waaaaaaaaaaay down on the list of concerns.