India’s Mars orbiter completes six years at the red planet, but where is the science?

[Microsoft]

Nothing except letting us know that some seemingly educated person somewhere can compare it with a camera. I think you need to grow up before asking about usefulness and uselessness of anything. No wait, dont ask even after you grow up.

Enjoy your $70m camera.

Whole world can see how stupid of a project this is now.

 

[IsThisNameAvailable]

Enjoy your $70m camera.

Whole world can see how stupid of a project this is now.

Correct. You are "whole world".

 

[Ajay Ghatak]

Give me 1 good reason to spend $70m to send a camera to Mars when I can get the pictures for free from India. Just 1.

The same good reason Soviet sent a radio with no songs in Sputnik 1. Scientific progress and developing space capabilities.

 

[Chhatrapati]

The fact you conflate sending a camera and an exploratory mission shows how much you know.

The fact that you think MCC is a simple camera shows how much you know, and that you think Mangalyaan has only a camera, read more if you can comprehend. Pakistanis smh.

 

[Itachi]

Umm, what useful projects ?

Already mentioned in this thread...post #34.

SUPARCO has limited itself for almost sixty years of existence in development of military rockets.

The problem is not SUPARCO but the past governments......they issued a low budget so that budget had to go to essentials before the non-essentials.....let alone expansion of the Space Programme.

The PR stunt being discussed in this thread was also on the decision of the Indian government. I'm sure Indian engineers would have voiced their opinion about the sunk costs of the Mars Orbiter. Just like Pakistani engineers voice opinions about the limitations of SUPARCO based on the government's decisions.

 

[Itachi]

You guys don't have that money to spend. Comprende !

We don't.......but we're quite happy seeing you put it on a orbiter around Mars. More money being spent on PR stunts means less money for other essential departments.

 

[charene514]

Enjoy your $70m camera.

Whole world can see how stupid of a project this is now.

No wonder SUPARCO didn't make ANY progress at all ! Keep at it.

 

[Ajay Ghatak]

Go and feed your 1 billion ragtag nation first before making bold claims. India puts Africa to shame.

Stay on the topic or get lost.

 

[bahadur]

India’s Mars orbiter completes six years at the red planet, but where is the science?

• September 23, 2020
• OP-EDS, PLANETARY SCIENCE, SPACE MISSIONS

Artist’s impression of the Mangalyaan spacecraft. Credit: ISRO
This September 24 marks six years since ISRO’s Mangalyaan spacecraft entered Mars orbit, making India the first Asian country to do so. What is even more impressive is that Mangalyaan was the country’s first interplanetary mission. Combined with the cost effectiveness for which it is lauded, Mangalyaan is often hailed as India’s most successful space mission. But is it?
Mangalyaan’s missing Science
The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has boasted that at ~$70 million, the mission was cheaper than the Hollywood film Gravity, and even an auto rickshaw (taxi-equivalent) on a fare-per-kilometer basis. The media highlighted Mangalyaan’s cost effectiveness too, noting that NASA’s MAVEN orbiter to Mars, launched around the same time, had cost about seven times more.
India’s pride in the mission while downplaying others has continued to spread over the years, also taking the form of dramatized movies like Mission Mangal. But what they all miss is looking at the science output i.e. what has Mangalyaan been doing in Mars orbit?
According to ISRO’s official list of publications, there have been only 27 peer-reviewed papers relating to Mangalyaan, after six years in orbit. In contrast, MAVEN has helped produce many seminal scientific results about the martian atmosphere, with a repository of at least 500 papers and growing. What’s more concerning about Mangalyaan’s short publications list is that about half of those are simply engineering descriptions of the mission, not scientific results from the mission.
Naysayers may dismiss the lack of science by arguing that Mangalyaan was a ‘technology demonstration’ mission, aimed at proving ISRO’s interplanetary mission capabilities. That may be part of it but that’s not how ISRO marketed the mission pre and post launch, when it was vocal about the science goals.
ISRO has made data from Mangalyaan’s five indigenous science instruments available on their data portal for five years now, and has explicitly welcomed the Indian science community to publish papers. In 2017, ISRO announced at the mission’s dedicated science meet that 32 research teams across the country are exploring and analyzing Mangalyaan data. And yet, there is a huge vacuum of publications.

Deployed view of the Mangalyaan spacecraft. Credit: ISRO
Perhaps the most notable failure concerns the much-hyped methane sensor. The instrument was supposed to globally map methane with a sensitivity of parts per billion, to help decide if the methane on Mars could be a sign of subsurface life. But two years after launch, the instrument was found to have a design flaw and so it can’t detect methane at all. At that point, ISRO repurposed the methane sensor as an albedo mapper, which measures sunlight reflected from the surface to get hints about Mars’ surface composition.
There also seem to be no published results from the Lyman Alpha Photometer. By looking for hydrogen escaping Mars’ atmosphere, it was supposed to tell us how much water Mars lost since its birth and at what rate. Notably, NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft was also expected to deliver this result (by examining many more factors), and it delivered.
The urge to be first
If the cost argument is to be made to justify some or any part of the missing science, ISRO’s own Chandrayaan 1 refutes it. At $54 million, it was cost effective too, and an equally challenging endeavor given that it was India’s first lunar orbiter.
Unlike Mangalyaan though, Chandrayaan 1 welcomed global collaboration – about half the instruments came from foreign space agencies and universities. Notably, it was the two NASA instruments that confirmed the discovery of water on the Moon. Despite orbiting the Moon for less than a year, Chandrayaan 1 produced hundreds of publications and scientists are analyzing its data even today.
This is not to say that ISRO can’t build good science instruments but to point out that collaboration can be an effective way to increase mission science without increasing mission cost. For some reason, ISRO doesn’t even fly science instruments from universities and institutions within the country for its planetary missions. The only exception has been India’s first space telescope Astrosat whose instruments were selected as a consensus from academic institutions across the country. But that’s not planetary exploration per se, for which ISRO operates differently. ISRO does intend to change this method in the future as part of its space commercialization initiative by involving private players and academic institutions.
Both the missing collaborations and lack of scientific output from Mangalyaan’s indigenous instruments may have to do with the mission’s development time, which was just 18 months. It’s unclear why ISRO was in such a hurry to launch in 2013 and couldn’t have targeted the 2016 launch opportunity instead. The reason may be political – the urge to successfully orbit Mars before China or Japan does.

Launch of Mangalyaan onboard a PSLV rocket on November 5, 2013. Credit: ISRO
Had Mangalyaan been given enough time, the scientific instruments package likely wouldn’t have been restricted to the mere 15 kilograms, and the output could’ve been substantial even with indigenous instruments. Case in point being ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 orbiter which carries state-of-the-art instruments, all indigenous, and is making the highest-resolution map of the Moon and quantifying water on its poles as we speak.
Another way Mangalyaan’s value could’ve been improved was if ISRO equipped it with a standard relay device, one that every NASA Mars orbiter carries. These orbiter relays allow NASA to get more science data from surface missions than would be possible otherwise. The European Space Agency put one such device for NASA on their Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in 2016. If ISRO had done that too, Instead of talking to NASA’s Curiosity on Twitter, Mangalyaan could’ve talked to the real deal.
Missing space exploration roadmap
More than the quality of the science instruments or mission planning, Mangalyaan highlights the lack of an overarching philosophy guiding India’s planetary missions. In contrast, NASA has an elaborate process called the Decadal Survey in which scientists from across the US present a consensus of prioritized space exploration destinations and scientific objectives once every decade. NASA uses the Decadal as a guide to build its missions, and the system therefore guarantees that said scientific goals are achieved more often than not. China and the European Space Agency have similar processes in place for their missions.
Space exploration missions are inherently costly undertakings, and at this point, the value per unit money matters as much as the absolute cost, if not more. MAVEN highlights this adequately. The mission, part of NASA’s larger Mars exploration program, is built with the express purpose of studying Mars’ atmosphere and determining exactly how the red planet lost its water. Thanks to its clear objectives, MAVEN delivered big science while still costing NASA less than many of its other endeavors, even if costing more than Mangalyaan.
Like NASA’s other missions, MAVEN’s findings feed directly into the agency’s next steps in Mars exploration and planning of future habitats, further cementing the value-proposition of such a model. India could benefit immensely from a formal planetary exploration framework which either doesn’t exist or whose functioning is inept and unclear to the public.
ISRO plans to launch Mangalyaan 2 in 2024 with an upgraded orbiter, with a capacity of 100 kilograms for scientific instruments. The mission could also include a lander and a rover but it seems unlikely at the moment. Notably, Mangalyaan 2 will launch after the first Mars rover missions from China and the European Space Agency, and alongside NASA’s ever present Mars fleet. Let us hope Mangalyaan 2 is an appropriate step forward in this journey.

Global view of Mars from the Mangalyaan spacecraft, taken on October 4, 2014, from an altitude of 76,680 kilometers. Credit: ISRO / Emily Lakdawalla, released under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.


Source

great achievement .

 

[Ajay Ghatak]

We don't.......but we're quite happy seeing you put it on a orbiter around Mars. More money being spent on PR stunts means less money for other essential departments.

A one time 70 million dollars expense return double or triple that amount in few years? I will take that chance any day.

 

[Dalit]

great achievement .

LOL anyone can pat themselves on the back. Doesn't make it great.

 

[bahadur]

Go and feed your 1 billion ragtag nation first before making bold claims. India puts Africa to shame. A nation where hundreds and millions of people don't have riof over their head and cannot eat 3 proper meals is trying to impress others with Mars ambitions.

we are not begging from china for mars mission .

 

[Ajay Ghatak]

LOL anyone can pat themselves on the back. Doesn't make it great.

Anyone can do nothing and sit on their posteriors whole time. Thats Pakistan's Space agency for you.

 

[Microsoft]

The fact that you think MCC is a simple camera shows how much you know, and that you think Mangalyaan has only a camera, read more if you can comprehend. Pakistanis smh.

Please tell me what else does the almighty Mangalyaan has...something that works

 

[bahadur]

Says the Indian beggar on a Pakistani defence forum. Don't brag on this forum.

what a retard , somebody report this scum .