Space science in India is always value for money

[IND151]

New Delhi, Dec. 1: Fisherman Nubin Roy felt a surge of pride when he heard about India’s Mars
mission that some activists have criticised as a project that prioritises esoteric science over basic needs in an unequal society.

But blind nationalism wasn't driving his pride.

Twice a week, Roy sails into the North Andaman Sea on his 12-metre-long motorised boat to haul in groupers, mackerel, red and white snappers, and tuna for dinner tables on the islands, elsewhere in India or in foreign lands.

Roy knows exactly where to anchor, guided by a strip of paper with latitude and longitude readings generated by scientists in Hyderabad who use India’s Oceansat-2 satellite topinpoint marine zones abundant in fish.

Since Roy began to rely on satellite-based potential fishing zone (PFZ) advisories three years ago, his boat has been returning with 400kg to 500kg fish from each trip, against the typical 200kg catch earlier. He’s bought a refrigerator, a TV and a cellphone.

“I don’t waste fuel, I sell more fish, and life is better,” said Roy, 29, who grew up in Port Blair but has spent the past 10 years as a fisherman-sailor in Shibpur, a village on the east coast of the island of North Andaman.

The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro’s) Mars orbiter spacecraft, launched on November 5, was nudged out of Earth orbit early today to begin its 10-month journey towards Mars.

The Mars mission has led some activists to question the wisdom of a planetary exploration mission by a nation struggling with poverty, inadequate drinking water, and health care.

“This mission is symbolic of misplaced policy and scientific priorities in an unequal society,” said Harsh Mander, a social worker and director of the Centre for Equity Studies, New Delhi. “This mission will not help India’s poor in the short or medium term.”

But senior Isro officials point out that the Mars mission has cost only about Rs 450 crore over three years, less than a tenth of the Rs 4,880 crore Isro spent during fiscal 2012-13 alone.

Besides, they say, the space programme has helped millions of people across India in ways that are not always, or widely, appreciated. Its projects have helped put fish on the table, ensure bank ATM machines reliably roll out cash, save lives through search-and-rescue operations and early cyclone warnings, and arm many domestic industries with superior quality-control mechanisms.

Some economic gains from the space programme — such as the amount of boat fuel saved or extra fish sold — are relatively easy to quantify. A study by the National Council for Applied Economic Research, New Delhi, suggests the annual economic benefits from satellite-based identification of PFZs is over Rs 34,000 crore, a sum close to what India’s space agency has spent over the past 10 years.

“You just can’t put a value on some impacts,” said Satheesh Shenoi, director of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (Incois), Hyderabad, the institution that sends PFZ advisories thrice a week to 225 fishing harbours along India’s coastline.

PFZ advisories are forecasts of fish abundance based on parameters such as ocean temperature, currents and plankton concentrations.

Isro’s satellite-aided search-and-rescue system, responding to seven mid-sea distress calls, helped save 61 people last year. The success rate of finding hidden groundwater reservoirs has risen to 80 per cent with the use of satellite imagery, from the earlier 50 per cent when conventional methods were employed, Isro scientists say.

Satellites allowed the Forest Survey of India to quickly detect several thousand forest fires in northern India last year.

Isro officials say the space agency will continue to promote space technology for economic and social development, as envisioned by its earliest architects including the late Vikram Sarabhai and evident through the nationwide reach of space applications.

“The Indian programme was developed under the conviction that space capabilities should be used to uplift the lives of people,” Bhupendra Jasani, a professor and space policy expert at King’s College London, told The Telegraph.

“To a large extent, these ideals have been fulfilled and it would be natural to move forward and use the technology for exploration. The Mars mission should be viewed in this light.”

Isro officials point out that 90 per cent of the space budget goes into the development of telecommunications, weather, and Earth-observation satellites and launch vehicles.

Since its early years, the space programme has been encouraging Indian industry to develop components and subsystems for its satellites and launch vehicles. Isro officials estimate that some 500 companies are now contributing to the programme.

The rigorous demands placed by the space agency has helped industries improve manufacturing processes and quality control.

“These gains have enabled many private companies to bid for outsourcing contracts for the global aerospace industry,” said V. Siddhartha, a former space department official who has also had nearly two decades of experience in the department of research and development organisation.

“The technological experience that HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) gained from its work with Isro has been a significant factor in HAL’s ability to forward-engineer into the stringent reliability and quality-control requirements of the fighter aircraft Tejas.”

Last year, India’s finance ministry and a consortium of public-sector banks contracted nine service providers to install and manage 63,000 bank ATMs across urban and rural India, many operating through satellite-based services.

Hughes Communications India, a company contracted for 27,000 offsite ATMs, said in a media release last year that the secure satellite connectivity would provide uptimes (the durations for which the ATMs are operational) higher than 99.9 per cent.

Outside the strategic or economic domains, satellite imagery is also used to predict yields of crops such as rice, wheat, potato and sugarcane.

“In less than four weeks, we can get a reliable estimate of the area under potato (cultivation) across the Indo-Gangetic plains,” said Islam Ahmed, a mathematician at the Central Potato Research Institute, Meerut. “Without satellites, reliable estimates aren’t available.”

A satellite-based tele medicine network connects 60 speciality hospitals to over 300 remote rural, district or mobile clinics. Doctors who have assessed one of these telemedicine hubs in Karnataka, however, say technical and non-technical factors are hampering the efficient use of the telemedicine services.

The doctors from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bangalore, observed that fluctuating satellite bandwidth had led to breakdowns in tele-pathology and tele-radiology services.

Their study, published last month in the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, also found that some doctors in remote clinics are at times reluctant to consult experienced doctors in the specialty hospitals.

https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&r...ye7qBwbMsHf7doXUwJPf-GA&bvm=bv.57155469,d.bmk

 

[IND151]

India’s space agency ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) spent a mere $75 million to launch a small spacecraft bound for Mars , 140 million miles away. Mangalyaan, Mars craft in Hindi, which took off earlier this week will be India’s first interplanetary mission and, if all goes well, will reach the Red Planet in September 2014 after a 300-day journey. That will make India the first Asian country, and the fourth in the world, to get to the planet.


Over the last five decades, India has spent a meager sum of money on its space program. The $75 million spent on the Mars mission – one commentator compared it with the budget of four big Bollywood movies – is a relatively trifling amount compared with the other four countries’ missions which cost billions of dollars. (Meanwhile, critics have deemed such an expense unwarranted in a country dogged by poverty.)

India is becoming known for low-cost innovation in diverse fields such as healthcare and education. The Mars mission is being cited as an example of the ingenuity that produces technology at stupendously low prices. The price tag on Mangalyaan has stirred the global space community.

In a conversation with Forbes, Kopillil Radhakrishnan, chairman of ISRO, explained how the agency made Mangalyaan the world’s least-expensive Mars endeavour. Excerpts:

1. “I don’t like the phrase ‘frugal engineering’. ISRO’s general philosophy is cost effectiveness. The Russians look for robustness and the Americans go after optimization. Our aim at ISRO was how do we get to Mars on a budget.”

2. “We adopted a modular approach. Take the launch vehicle, for instance. We acquired the technology for the Vikas engine in the 1970s by working with the French. There was no money transaction. We have since produced 120 such engines with Indian materials and fully fabricated here. For every successive launch, we have taken the base of our previous, proven launch technology, modified and built on it. Here, we had to add the cryo to the previous module as we needed higher engine power. We used the same modular tactic with our payload as well. The modular approach gave us cost and schedule advantages.”

3. “When we conducted ground tests – which are time consuming and expensive – we kept the number of tests small but wrung out the best out of each. This is our way, historically.”

4. “For transferring Mangalyaan from the earth’s orbit to Mars’ orbit, we used a couple of strategies to bring down fuel consumption drastically.”

5. “We are schedule-driven to the extreme. This prevents cost over-runs. The mission has taken 15 months from the time our Prime minister announced it in August last year to the liftoff.
In parts of Europe, even space scientists have a 35-hour workweek. For us here, 18-hour days are common. During the launch period, many of our scientists were working 20 hour-days. Being time effective makes us cost effective.”

The Mars craft will take nearly a month to build up the velocity to break free from the earth’s orbit and begin its long journey to Mars.

https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CDEQFjAC&url=http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2013/11/07/how-indias-isro-launched-its-mars-mission-at-cut-rate-costs/&ei=53ecUobaGoOTrgeDtYDgDg&usg=AFQjCNFA0v-r4hU1VQ67rimA5Jt1VyhL0g

 

[IND151]

Proud of ISRO

 

[thesolar65]

Well, It's common Indian way of doing things "Always thinking about Value for Money" and it is taught from generation to generation.

 

[Echo_419]

Proud of ISRO

3 areas where we should heavily invest is
Aerospace,Space & nuclear energy
This will ensure continued properuty of our nation
Hopefully next govt will pay more attention to R&D

 

[GR!FF!N]

thanks for a really informative article.

 

[IND151]

thanks for a really informative article.

my pleasure

 

[MohitV]

this is the fruit of developing indigenous technology....less spending and more benefit.......lets hope soon this will be followed in our defence sector

 

[surya kiran]

One of the benefits which nobody pays attention to is telemedicine. Was working as a consultant for a provider of tele medicine and was really happy to see poor rural folk avail of simple and advanced consultations with good doctors remotely. These are intangibles and very difficult to put a cost to these kind of things. The ability of mobile vans which park in interior locations to provide healthcare would have been impossible without ISRO. Anybody, who says misplaced priorities needs their brains checked or needs to visit ISRO and get themselves educated on what and how ISRO services are used.

 

[Levina]

I luv everything about ISRO.

But this line caught my eye

During the launch period, many of our scientists were working 20 hour-days. Being time effective makes us cost effective.”

I think our scientists are overworked and that they are made to work assiduously.
The employees are made to work till their break points.
In past we have lost many Indian scientists to foreign agencies.

 

[livingdead]

I luv everything about ISRO.

But this line caught my eye
I think our scientists are overworked and that they are made to work assiduously.
The employees are made to work till their break points.
In past we have lost many Indian scientists to foreign agencies.

scintists hate red tape and lack of incentives. Scientists dont mind overworking when they are doing something new and challenging, and making history. Besides 20 hr is only for last few days.
Off late ISRO is addressing this issue (of challenging scientists) which is why we got lunar and mars missions, even though they do not bring any tangible benefit.

 

[Shinigami]

DRDO must seek help from ISRO about how to operate an organization

 

[Levina]

scintists hate red tape and lack of incentives. Scientists dont mind overworking when they are doing something new and challenging, and making history. Besides 20 hr is only for last few days.
Off late ISRO is addressing this issue (of challenging scientists) which is why we got lunar and mars missions, even though they do not bring any tangible benefit.

Its not just about 20hrs,our scientists work hard,really hard but they are paid in peanuts.I am sure you have read Dr.Abdul Kalam's book "Wings of fire" where he had expressed his concern over the same.
Our scientists are overworked and under paid.And brain drain is a reality.I hope ISRO is taking measures to curb this.

 

[MohitV]

-AVATAR is a concept under development by ISRO in collaboration with DRDO. It is a single-stage reusable spaceplane capable of horizontal takeoff and landing. This project is still in the early stages of conception.

-ISRO is working on Space Capsule Recovery Experiment (SRE-II) with the main objective of realizing a fully recoverable capsule and to provide a platform to conduct microgravity experiments.

-ISRO is also working on a Human Spaceflight Program to undertake a human spaceflight mission to carry a crew of two to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and return them safely to a predefined destination on earth.

 

[KRAIT]

scintists hate red tape and lack of incentives. Scientists dont mind overworking when they are doing something new and challenging, and making history. Besides 20 hr is only for last few days.
Off late ISRO is addressing this issue (of challenging scientists) which is why we got lunar and mars missions, even though they do not bring any tangible benefit.

What do you mean by bringing no tangible benefit ?

These space missions plays an important role in steep learning curve. If you want to make a good commercial vehicle, you have to make prototypes, do many tests so that more things can be learned, perfected, to understand area of improvements and most important real time feedback]practical one than theoretical one.

We lost communication link with Moon orbiter, and this would have helped us in Mangalyaan mission and then when we do more challenging work, this experience will come handy.