Mangalyaan Gets Ready To Enter Mars Orbit 67
William Robinson (875390) writes India's Mars Orbiter Mission, known as Mangalyaan is now at a distance of just nine million kilometres from the red planet, and is scheduled to enter the orbit of Mars at 7.30 am on September 24. Mangalyaan was launched on 5th November 2013 by ISRO, presently busy planning to reduce the speed of the spacecraft through the process of firing the LAM engine and bring it to 1.6 km/sec, before it is captured by the planet's gravity. Eventually, the mission's official updates page should catch up.
Congratulations, India ! (Score:5, Insightful)
India appears to be the ONE country that has the "ooomph" in terms of the CAN DO spirit
Not only their space launch costs much less than the one from NASA, it costs less than the one from ESA (Europe), from Japan, from Russia and from China !
We should learn from India on how to keep cost down
Again, congratulations are in order for India !!
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Correct me if I'm wrong but... would you happen to be rooting for India by any chance?
Re: Congratulations, India ! (Score:3, Funny)
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>The wrong way to do it is to take things one at a time: first get plumbing and sanitation in place, and only then work on getting a meal into every child's belly, and only then provide basic education, and only then introduce mechanised farming, and only then work on a national road network and electrical system, and so on. India's space program is money well (and frugally) spent.
So it's an excuse for not doing these things at all? India is such a shithole, and not because Indians are bad people. It's
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So it's an excuse for not doing these things at all?
They are doing both the space program and doing something about living conditions. The problem is that fixing poverty is hard, and like the problem of travelling to the moon or Mars, you don't solve it merely by allocating a budget, that's only the start. If fixing poverty was easy, a lot of other countries wouldn't have any. Hell, perhaps the USA wouldn't have any. And fixing their poor living conditions probably costs a multiple of what it costs to run their space program. According to their 2013 bud
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Hold on there. Plumbing and sanitation is an absolute MUST before you start putting food in everyone's belly. Are YOU gonna clean up that mess?
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I can teach you: pay people smaller salaries. Compare average income in India and The West to see why cost of building stuff is different. The cost of a potato is the income of the person who grew it.
Total BS. With high tech projects, countries with lower per capita cannot compete because they cannot afford to buy the component pieces. Even if you have lots of people with low salaries in a warehouse, they can't just create the parts needed in a short time. Even if you have the components, you cannot just train people in a short time to integrate components that nobody in the country has used before.
You say the cost of potato is the income of the person who grew it. But, what about oil? The price is ab
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Yeah, too bad there's a billion people there with no running water or plumbing, but hey, pictures of a dead rock!
What *IS* this fucking emotional gushing you techno man-children have about space?
Your first point does overshadow all here, but let's not dismiss the urgency to get away from the bloodlust of warfare.
Anything seems to make more sense than sitting around killing ourselves while consuming this planet.
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As opposed to California, where there are only forty million people without running water.
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the ONE country eh? No other country has put orbiters around Mars and landers on Mars multiple times in the last 40 years?
As for reduced cost, this Indian probe doesn't have a quarter the capability of NASA MRO
But give them a couple decades, they'll be where NASA is now
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No, the points you raise are irrelevant. All government science programs are constrained by budget and other things, regardless of countries. So what, do you even have a point?
NASA has had incredible accomplishments with Mars exploration for over 40 years, limited budget and all.
Not news (Score:5, Funny)
Because 9 million miles is no more newsworthy than 8 million or 10.
I'm reminded of the old joke:
"What famous event happened in 1732?"
"George Washington was born."
"Very good. Now what famous event happened in 1743?'
"George Washington became 11 years old."
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MAVEN (Score:1)
It's only ahead of Siding Spring by a month (Score:3)
Hmm... It's only ahead of the comet Siding Spring by about a month. Will it have time/fuel to "duck and cover" by getting to the far side of the planet before the close approach of the comet and the potential of a cometary dust storm that could wreck it? (Contrary to what some people think, it doesn't take much energy to change your orbital position IF you've got time. A simple change of 1 meter/sec from the thrusters will, after one year mean a distance of over 30,000 km. That simplification ignores some orbital dynamics but you get the picture.) Of course Mangalyaan doesn't have a year but it has much greater delta-vee capability, its orbital insertion burn is (I think) 1.6 KM/sec. And maybe it would've been on the far side of the planet anyway.
On the other hand, maybe it's near the comet NOW, or nearer to the comet than any other spacecraft. Perhaps it can take some good close-ups of the comet or at least see it from a different angle. (If it can see a full or partial eclipse of the sun by the comet, scientists may be able to determine the comet's composition or the composition of the comet's coma. It might be able to do it using radio wave occultation from earth.). In any case, it's good that there will be another spacecraft near the comet when it arrives at mars! Too bad the U.S. isn't willing to risk sacrificing one of its older orbiters (I think one has been around mars for about a decade) for a close flyby. (Again, given enough advance planning, a surprisingly small amount of delta-vee would be required to put one of the orbiters on a collision course, especially if gravitational chaotic resonances AKA "the interplanetary highway" were harnessed.)
Too bad we didn't know about this close encounter say a decade ago. We might have been able to send a probe that could've used mars' gravity to slingshot a probe into a matching trajectory with it so that, like the ESA Rosetta probe, we could rendezvous, orbit and land on it!
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Another way to look at it is that the close encounter between a comet and Mars is perhaps a once in a century opportunity to learn about how material from the comet interacts with Mars and its atmosphere, so the satellites in orbit around Mars should mainly be looking down at the effects on Mars.
Spacecraft-comet encounters can be had a lot more frequently than spacecraft-planet-comet encounters.
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While this is a non-zero probability event, it is a low probability event. I doubt that the mission planners are particularly worried about it.
Maybe if there's a mission-compatible way of sequencing things that will reduce this low probability even further, at little cost (which is what Hubble did during a predicted Leonid
Hey Indians! (Score:1)
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There's a joke here about tech support (Score:2)
Road side service (Score:1)
Considering the damage (http://www.space.com/26472-mars-rover-curiosity-wheel-damage.html [space.com]) there was no way Cross Roads (http://cria.co.in/crweb/ [cria.co.in]) could wiggle out of it's responsibility.
A little late to be planning (Score:2)
presently busy planning to reduce the speed of the spacecraft through the process of firing the LAM engine
I'd hope they'd have got all of the planning done before launch, and would instead be getting busy implementing.
Congratulations, India! (Score:3)
Is Mangalyaan chasing a zephyr? (Score:2)
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I'm actually seriously asking, I have no clue.
As a point of information... (Score:2)
Who built the rocket and spacecraft? Was it the Indian space agency, or was it built by large aerospace companies for India?
mark "is he suggesting that the govenment, on civil service wages, could do it cheaper?"