Mangalyaan was a great Scientific Mission  to planet Mangal

Mangalyaan was a great Scientific Mission  to planet Mangal

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Mangalyaan was a great Scientific Mission  to planet Mangal

When India’s Mangal  Orbiter Mission (MOM) spacecraft successfully entered planet Mangal’s  orbit on September 23, 2014, it made the Indian Space Research Organisation  the fourth organisation in the world to achieve the feat, after NASA, the space agency of the erstwhile Soviet Union and the European Space Agency (ESA).

However the feather in the cap was that while USA  achieved its success  in the second attempt and Russia in 8th attempt, ISRO did it in the first attempt. A second very important thing was  ‘Mangalyaan’  India’s first interplanetary  space vehicle   cost just Rs 525 Crores. This  earned it even more international applause  from Asian,  African and South American countries, as it showed that space exploration was a doable thing for other countries  too.

A third factor which riles NASA and European Space Agencies is that  ISRO officially described the Mangalyaan spacecraft’s end of life  on 03 October 22 press release without giving out any technical details. Thus  despite being designed for a life-span of just six months as a technology demonstrator, the Mangal  Orbiter Mission has lived for about eight years in the Mangal  orbit with a gamut of significant scientific results on Mangal  as well as on the Solar corona, before losing communication with the ground station, as a result of a long eclipse in April 2022.   

ISRO  said  that the propellant must have been exhausted, and therefore, the desired altitude  positioning  could not be achieved for sustained power generation. It was declared that the spacecraft was  non-recoverable, and attained its end-of-life. The mission would  be ever-regarded as a remarkable technological and scientific feat in the history of planetary exploration.

Now what agitates the NASA and others is that ISRO never officially communicated any efforts or technical details to keep the spacecraft alive, which they were eagerly waiting, as it would give them load of data to study and find out how ISRO achieves such super results. Same was  the clamour made when India had exploded  both nuclear and  thermonuclear devices at Pokhran in 1998. A few even went to the extent of declaring it as fake or a failed test.

The same was the case, when Pentagon was shocked by a MiG 21 Bison downing a F16 and a dozen or so AARM missile fired by F16s failed to reach their targets. Every joker in the Pack wanted proof from IAF,  it’s silence infuriated every one to tell hilt.

Western Agencies are quite sad that  ISRO  a  publicly funded agency has hidden all details.  As if NASA and others give out all the details on daily basis. 

Then every one is very angry ( no wonder that Cartoon in one of those crap paper after success of Mangalyaan ) about ISRO calling Mangalyaan a “scientific” success.  The continuous  barb is that  Mangalyaan produced no scientific results….. but Who cares in India ….mirchi laagi to main kya kaaru. Even the name Mangalyaan must be galling them.

NASA is not happy at all regarding the ‘ lethargic ‘ attitude of ISRo Scientists  as they have produced   only 27  papers relating to Mangalyaan, even  after six years of the craft  being  in orbit. In contrast, they gloat about their MAVEN which  helped them to churn out   many “seminal”  scientific results about the Mangal’s  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. NASA probably dreads another sudden coup by ISRO from the hidden scientific materials.

Well NASA seems to be rather very happy regarding  failure of  the  methane sensor on the Mangalyaan. The instrument was  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. ……or is that Indians have quietly gathered all the data for use in future.

The NASA apprehension though may not be unfounded.  As S.M. Ahmed, a former member of Chandrayaan-1’s Moon Impact Probe and then the principal scientific officer at the Central Instrumentation Facility, University of Hyderabad, and Anindya Sarkar, a professor of geology and head of the National Mass Spectrometry facility at IIT Kharagpur, have contested  MAVEN achievements  as touted by NASA versus achievements of Mangalyaan.  

One  chap batting for NASA  writes : For every ISRO mission, the trajectory is known first, before the payload. In other words, ISRO knew the path that MOM would take from Prithvi  to Mangal  and then the shape of its orbit around Mangal  before finalising the instruments that would be onboard MOM. Yet many of the instruments were not designed for the elliptical orbit that MOM operated in, limiting the value of their scientific output. “  However he does  not clarify that why did NASA first mission fail,  they too knew everything !!!

Now grapes are sour, so NASA apologists gloat that Mangalyaan’s scientific output is low  because it was never designed to be a scientific mission. For them  Mangalyaan was a  just a technology demonstrator,  right from making things work with an unusually small launch vehicle to the planetary exploration technologies it helped develop for India. Keep gloating they should and wait for a new surprise !!

What is hilarious is  that they are agitated and accusing  India for   “  forcibly”  calling the Mangal Mission a Scientific Mission. They feel it is not only  something more is not just wrong but dangerous….. for whom has not been clarified.

Some are even trying to cajole ISRO  to publish at least more scientific papers comparable with  endeavours undertaken  for   Chandrayaan 1 or AstroSat, each of which  have led to hundreds of published works in  international journals. The emphasis is on  the ongoing Chandrayaan 2 orbiter, with  specific papers  – such as quantifying water on the Chandrama’s  poles and the sunlit surface.

Another example demonstrating the orbiter’s raw capacity  published in an international journal that concerns the amount of plasma in  Cchandrama’sc exosphere. This is a key characterising measurement never undertaken by any prior spacecraft.  ISRO shared another similarly vetted and unique result on the agency’s website on October 7, about the first global-scale sodium maps of Chandrama.

So international community is sad, anguished and terribly angry at the same time that ISRO is giving out  a steady stream of quality results on Chandrama but  sadly, simply never on  Mangalyaan.

Time to surprise everyone with a Shukrayaan and another Mangalyaan.