India's Mars Mission Back On Track After Brief Hiccup 73
New submitter rahultyagi writes "After running into some problems in its fourth orbit-raising maneuver two days ago, Mangalyaan (India's Mars Orbiter Mission) seems to be back on track now. A supplementary burn lasting ~304 seconds was completed today, raising the apogee of MOM to 118,642 km — the intended apogee after the original maneuver. After the glitch two days ago, ISRO again seems to be on track to become the first entity to have a successful Mars mission on its first attempt. Though, of course, there are quite a few things that might still go wrong before this can be called a successful mission. Let's all hope that a year from now, we are all celebrating the entry of another nation into the small club capable of successful interplanetary missions."
Re: Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:1)
"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Bollywood. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." ... seconds later mass-dancing in the command room. I can imagine that the borg, romulans, klingons and other cilisation may get slightly irritated by that.
Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:4, Insightful)
Since someone is looking for "Casual Racism", I'll oblige.
All power to India for their mission to MARS.
And this greeting comes from an American who was from China.
How's that for "Casual Racism" ??
Re: Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:5, Interesting)
...
Did you know that if indisns shake their head from left to right that it means they agree with you ?
The difference is small... Let me clear this for the un-initiated.. if you consider an axis through the center of your head and the centre of your...nether region, and if the head shaking is about this axis, then it means "No" If you consider an axis through the tip of your nose and the back of your head, and if the head shaking is about THIS axis, then it means "Alright" or "affirmative"(especially if the indian you're talking to happens to be a terminator). Not to be confused with "yes". Source: I'm Indian
Re: Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:4, Informative)
Yaw means "no", roll means affirmative, as in agreement - not quite the same as yes, as it still signifies agreement with a negative statement/question.
e.g. a) "Are you a meat popsicle?" roll is affirmative, I am a meat popsicle (English equivalent answer is "yes" in this case)
e.g. b) "You're not a meat a meat popsicle are you?" roll is affirmative, I am not a meat popsicle (English equivalent answer is "no" in this case)
It's like "hai" in Japanese.
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How about a positive answer to a negative question? As in "doch" in German (or "jo" in Danish, "jawel" in Dutch", "si" in French). English is "yes" or "yes I am" or something to remove the ambiguity.
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That is actually quite interesting. So, do they still have pitch for "yes" as well?
Only Slashdot could move from "casual racism" to "casual aerodynamicism". I am impressed.
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Commander: "Shakes his head from left to right (roll or whatever)"
This is sooooo lost!
Really? You had to get into aliens/human voyages scenarios for f*ck ups? I'm sure the US' refusal to adopt the SI system (along with illustrious company in the form of Burma and Libera) would burn everyone to a crisp before they got out of the atmosphere. (NASA - Needs Another Seven Astronauts).
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Re:Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not racism to cry USA number 1 and hope other countries fail
Hoping others will fail is a sign of inadequacy.
Re:Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:5, Funny)
It's not racism to cry USA number 1 and hope other countries fail... (just nationalistic jingoism)
And why not - America's German scientists did a better job laying the foundations of space flight than Russia's German scientists did.
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And why not - America's German scientists did a better job laying the foundations of space flight than Russia's German scientists did.
First satellite, first animal in space, first man in space, first woman in space, first robotic moon landing.
I would say that Russia's German scientists did the best job at laying the foundations of space flight.
First man on the moon could be considered the last mile. (Unless someone intends to be the first to put a man on Mars.)
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The Americans have already faked a Mars landing :-)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077294/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 [imdb.com]
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The AC is cherry picking the space firsts as is usually done with this common post. Not to take away from the Soviets who really did accomplish the 'firsts' listed, the USA had: first successful mission to another planet (Mariner 2 flyby of Venus in 1962), first successful mission to Mars (Mariner 4 flyby of Mars in 1964), first orbital rendezvous (Gemini 6 in 1966), first spacecraft docking (Gemini 8 in 1966). These were all within the first 10 years after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1. Arguably the
Re:Casual slashdot racism in 3... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually the Soviets didn't get the scientists, they mostly left with Von Braun. The technicians that were left behind and the hardware that they hadn't been able to destroy were all the Soviets obtained. The Soviet space program was almost completely home-grown, before WWII they were probably second (after Germany) in rocket design. That is why the Energia looks so dramatically different than the Saturn V, other than some advanced metallurgy techniques and (IIRC) turbo-fuel pumps they really didn't get much from the German effort.
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The attack on Pearl Harbor was not an invasion. Japan never planned on occupying the islands. Their main goal was to sink our carriers. In that they failed. Probably the main reason they lost the war. That and the whole A-bomb thing.
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You mean the way Europeans had as much right to North America as the tribes that were already here? I'm not following.
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2... 1...
The cause of the delay was due to the fact that the operators were diverted to a call centre operator in Mumbai who simply read off a script and provided no actual help.
The real Triumph.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exciting. Really exciting. First the successful moon mission and now this.
However, from a ISRO's standpoint, this is more significant from another angle too.
With such low cost, now others are looking at India as a satellite launch country. Even before, those who wanted satellite launches, often came to ISRO if cost was an issue. But success rate was not too good.
With this mission reaching this stage, ISRO has shown that it can launch any type of satellite. From satellite launch perspective, this is a complete success. No doubt about it.
All these dollars invested will come back over the next few years, as more and more companies gain more trust in ISRO launch capabilities. I won't be surprised if ISRO recovers all the costs of this mission from commercial launches within the next 5 years.
I am at awed at their low cost ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... I was doing some reading on India's Mars mission and found two articles quoting the price tag for the entire mission to be $ 83 million.
Yes, you read it right, Eight-Three-Million-United-States-Dollars !
I don't know what NASA can come up with $ 83 Million, but I am pretty sure if NASA to send another probe to Mars it would be far greater than that.
PS. To my Indian friends, can you please share with us how you guys can keep the budget so low?
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Modular design, off-the-shelf components as far as possible and low salaries (obviously). Only one copy of the spacecraft was built as opposed to NASAs 2 or 3 .
Here are the links to the two news articles (Score:1)
I'm sorry, I forgot to include the links to the two new articles that I mentioned in my previous comment.
Here they are ...
http://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india/india-to-launch-orbiter-to-mars-next-week--29838.html [indiatvnews.com] [indiatvnews.com]
http://www.firstpost.com/india/will-isro-mars-mission-start-an-indo-china-space-race-1211933.html [firstpost.com] [firstpost.com]
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PS. To my Indian friends, can you please share with us how you guys can keep the budget so low?
duh, they obviously outsourced the work to ind-uhh... that is a good question.
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PS. To my Indian friends, can you please share with us how you guys can keep the budget so low?
duh, they obviously outsourced the work to ind-uhh... that is a good question.
Heh, that was quite funny!
There's very little I know about ISRO. But there are a few things that work well in India (as a government run entity) and ISRO is definitely one of them. You have to understand that for several decades, Indian organzations like ISRO had to innovate and invent even basic engineering stuff largely in isolation. The homegrown Param supercomputer was also a repsonse to this - because most high technology items (even basic things like CPUs and interconnects) could not be imported as th
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As such, the frugality of organizations like ISRO is more of a byproduct of the severely constrained environment in which they grew up in.
I had a chance to visit ISRO and DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) as a high school student (won some competition), and the difference in the approach was night and day. There are smart people in each organization, but the ISRO people seem to take pride in their work, and are very ambitious to succeed from the top down. They have a very efficient chain of command, and not much politics. They all work towards a common goal - there isn't the head of one lab pitching a mission to Pluto, whi
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They will give it to CGI Federal to make nasa.gov web site which crashes & then ask people to call a 800 number where a cal center employee would describe what would have been shown if the site hadn't crashed.
Re:I am at awed at their low cost ... (Score:5, Funny)
They didn't do everything. They did only the needful.
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The same way a subcompact car is cheaper than a sedan - it's smaller and less capable. (And in the case of MOM having a smaller suite of simpler instruments.) Building cheap is one thing, actually accomplishing it's mission is another. Despite the premature hype over "on track to be the first nation to reach Mars on it's first try", it remains to be seen if this approach will be a successful one. Let's wait and s
Re:The real Triumph.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The real Triumph.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is exciting. Really exciting. First the successful moon mission and now this. However, from a ISRO's standpoint, this is more significant from another angle too. With such low cost, now others are looking at India as a satellite launch country. Even before, those who wanted satellite launches, often came to ISRO if cost was an issue. But success rate was not too good. With this mission reaching this stage, ISRO has shown that it can launch any type of satellite. From satellite launch perspective, this is a complete success. No doubt about it. All these dollars invested will come back over the next few years, as more and more companies gain more trust in ISRO launch capabilities. I won't be surprised if ISRO recovers all the costs of this mission from commercial launches within the next 5 years.
That's an excellent point - and one that people who criticise India for spending money on research should listen to. If this demonstrates the ability of the ISRO it is a good investment with the potential of bringing in many times that money as revenue. Apart from that so little is known about Mars that all data collected will add to our understanding.
Scorecard Needs Update (Score:1)
ISRO Mars Mission Casual Racisism (Score:1)
This guy says is better than I can - http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission-Poverty-and-Closet-Racism?srid=7qo&share=1 [quora.com]
long burn? (Score:3)
five minutes is a pretty long correcting burn... I hope they didn't go through most of their spare fuel in the process. (TBH I wouldn't have expected them to have that much available in the first place, lifting spare fuel isn't like throwing a spare headlight in the trunk, five minutes' fuel is more like throwing a spare tire in the back seat) Anyone have any data on how much "buffer fuel" they carried, and how much they went through with this fix?
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Was a bit concerned about this as well but from what I am reading the flow to the liquid fuel engines stopped resulting in an underburn. Since it wasn't a bad directional thrust or something no fuel was wasted during the failed 4th burn so most if not all of the fuel from the 5th emergency burn was leftover from the incomplete one. Lets hope for the best.
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I had considered that, but the issue there is, underburn results in not getting as far away from a gravity well as you intended, and that should introduce an exponentially increasing energy requirement to recover. In other words, if you only burn 10 liters in the time you meant to burn 12, you can't just burn 2 and make up for it, because it's going to require a little more than that to get where you should be?
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The AC below is me. Also I started looking things up and got pretty into reading about it. Specifically http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberth_effect [wikipedia.org] that seems interesting in and off itself and also explains why the burn at that point gives the most bang for your buck.