thestringshredder
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A former head of Indias space agency today dubbed its proposed first Mars mission to be launched later this year as a publicity stunt that is unlikely to achieve any meaningful science.
G. Madhavan Nair, former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, said Isro appears willing to compromise on science by launching a Mars orbiter spacecraft using the only available homegrown rocket this year.
When we send a spacecraft all the way (to Mars), we should aim to get meaningful scientific results, not just launch a mission to show off, Nair told The Telegraph over telephone. We should ask what are we going to get out of this mission?
Isro scientists say the spacecraft to be launched in October this year and expected to be injected into Mars orbit in September 2014 will carry five scientific instruments that will seek to reconstruct the climate history of Mars and look for methane, a possible signature of microbial life.
Nair said Isro is compromising on scientific objectives by launching the spacecraft using the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) instead of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV), which can ferry heavier payloads into space.
Nair is among four former senior Isro scientists who were censured by the government last year for their role in a controversial scrapped deal between Isros commercial arm Antrix and Devas, a private satellite communications company.
The use of the PSLV imposes limits on the weight of the Mars orbiter which will have to be placed in a highly elliptical orbit, its nearest point 500km from the planet and its most distant point about 80,000km away.
Isro is using the PSLV, a proven workhorse rocket, because the GSLV is not ready yet. But it will be very difficult to perform any meaningful remote sensing mission through such a highly elliptical orbit, Nair said.
A senior Isro scientist had told this newspaper earlier this year that while Mars has been studied through orbiters and landers for more than three decades, Isros orbiter is being designed to make some measurements more precisely than has been done earlier.
Isro laboratories in Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram have developed the scientific instruments for the Rs 450-crore Mars orbiter mission.
Nair said if Isro was keen on achieving new scientific objectives through its Mars mission, it should have either waited for the GSLV to be ready or used a foreign rocket to launch a heavier PSLV that had enough fuel reserves to be lowered into a more suitable orbit around Mars.
In an interview earlier in the day to the Press Trust of India, Nair had said Isro is embarking on an extravagant mission which at best can serve as a publicity stunt.
But Isro scientists assert that scientific measurements can be performed even through the highly elliptical orbit. One instrument aboard the orbiter will carry a sensor for methane, while another scientific payload will study the isotopes of hydrogen on Mars in an attempt to piece together a history of the planets climate.
Isro engineers also say a programme to send a spacecraft into Mars orbit will pose new technological challenges that Isro did not encounter during its first lunar orbiter mission in 2008-09.
Link - Isro ex-boss dismisses Mars
