India's Mars mission crosses half the distance. | Hacker News Reader

India's Mars mission crosses half the distance.

economictimes.indiatimes.com

145 pointseasyname36 comments

The last 20 Km of missions like these are the hard ones, once you're off the pad. It's roughly 1/3rd between failure to launch, failure to arrive at the destination planet and failure to land (the latter not applicable here since it is an orbiter).

60% of the missions fail, which really isn't all that surprising given the complexities of a project like this.

Great to see it got this far, hoping that it will complete the interplanetary travel part of the mission around September of this year.

Lots of data here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Orbiter_Mission

> The Rs 450-crore mission intends to explore the presence of Methane in the Red Planet with the help of five scientific instruments on board the spacecraft.

That is roughly $75 million.

Isn't that dirt cheap for a trip to Mars? Like, much lower than NASA missions to the moon?

It's lower than market prices for building and launching a satellite to low-earth orbit.

Robert frost gave a good explanation why it is so on Quora.

http://www.quora.com/Robert-Frost-Quora-user/What-are-Robert...

That is a very simplistic and uninformed view. He does not compare the cost of electronics, gas, automobiles or even other exotic foods. Each of these cost more in India than they do in USA. One has to consider how much of the costs of the mission are actually spent on paying salaries compared to purchasing & building the equipment needed for the mission.

The actual answer may have something to do with the fact that India did not spend a lot of money on R&D specifically for the Mars mission. They are leveraging existing technologies and knowledge from earlier missions (including some from NASA and ESA).

India does/did a lot of ground work on all its own.

The fact is this concept called 'frugal engineering' or commonly called in Hindi as 'Jugaad'. Its a little unfair to call is 'frugal engineering', this is more on the lines of 'Do what it takes, with whatever little you have, to go where ever you want to go'.

Its really more like a cultural thing here. After centuries of invasions, foreign rule and desperation the idea is to see some success at any cost. You try to beat the odds any way you can.

Sorry about the miscommunication. I meant to say India reused a lot of its own technology as well as what is available from other resources. You are right that the culture at ISRO is very utilitarian. But please do not try to generalize it for India in general. There are a lot of wasted resources in other organizations.

Apart from the economic differences (outlined in Robert Frost's Quora post), ISRO also practised "frugal engineering"[1] by making use of their existing technologies/framework while building spacecraft. For example, MOM is based on ISRO's proven I-1K spacecraft bus[2], and its onboard propulsion system is based on their apogee kick motor[3]. Payloads are completely new and developed specific to the mission.

ISRO's Moon mission Chandrayaan-1[4] cost around $64 million back in 2008. It's relatively "costly" compared to Mars mission because ISRO had to do some groundwork to support such deep space missions. For example, Indian Deep Space Network[5] was built at that time to track Chandrayaan-1; and now it's being used to track MOM as well.

[1]http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-10-31/news...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-1K

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apogee_kick_motor

[4]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1

[5]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Deep_Space_Network

I hope the frugal engineering works out for them. In 1990 I spent a semester working at GE AstroSpace as an intern, and one of my tasks was a small role on the Mars Observer(1) probe. It was also a frugal, based on an Earth-orbiting satellite design that was repurposed for a deep-space mission to Mars orbit. It apparently blew up when it got there, likely due to a failure in the fuel system. That's where I come in.

In early 1990, there was a weight problem with the spacecraft, and the engineers were looking for ways to eliminate mass. I was working with the propulsion team, and my task was to go through all of the blueprints, count components, and document their mass. The team was going to use that to determine which components were redundant (for safety) and how much mass could be eliminated by removing them.

I did my task, and went on to something else so I don't know how the system was modified. But from what I've read about the loss of the spacecraft, a leading theory is that one of the valves in the propulsion system failed and that led to the explosion. The valves were designed to be opened very soon after launch, once the satellite reached Earth orbit; they weren't designed for the deep-freeze of a two-year trip to Mars before being opened. I beleive that not only did the valve malfunction, but its redundant backup had also been removed based, in part, on the task I performed. If there hadn't been a weight problem (which may also have been to frugal engineering to reduce fuel requirements), the explosion might not have happened.

I've never felt any responsibilty; my task was to provide information, not decisions. But it would have been nice if I was involved with a more successful mission.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer

Thanks for sharing your anecdote!

In fact, ISRO's Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 ended prematurely due to overheating of star sensor and power supply unit (inadequate thermal protection!). They underestimated the amount of radiation from the Sun and that reflected by the Moon, at an orbit of 100km from the Moon[1].

For MOM, ISRO has "hardened" their satellite bus with better thermal protection, larger solar panels, redundant subsystems, redundant fuel lines, FDIR system etc.[2] Hoping for the best :)

[1]http://www.brighthub.com/science/space/articles/48921.aspx

[2]http://www.isro.gov.in/pslv-c25/pdf/pslv-c25-brochure.pdf ("Major Challenges" section)

Cool. Another of my jobs at GE AstroSpace involved writing software to help with the analysis of thermal system modeling. At its heart, thermal modeling is basically the same as one of the approaches for lighting models for 3D graphics: every surface within the spacecraft is radiating and absorbing heat from every other surface that it faces. This is similar to the way every surface in a 3D model visualization is emitting, reflecting, and absorbing various frequencies of light from every other surface it faces in the model.

The math is the same, but in the thermal model you're calculating an equilibrium state to figure out the final temperature of each surface, or cyclic variation in the case of a rotating spacecraft with the sun and other emitting bodies around it. That tells you if temperatures are within the tolerance range of the components over the mission lifetime. If not, you have to add thermal protection and rerun the simulation.

This probably all goes a lot faster today than it did on the 1990's era VAX minicomputer I was using. There's probably real-time visualization now, which I'll bet is pretty cool.

This is very interesting! I wonder if it'll ever come to the point where it'll be cheaper to just do trial and error more often and keep fixing issues than to take the big-design-up-front approach.

I doubt it. Unlike software, the material costs for a spaceflight are substantial and they're mostly/completely unrecoverable. Especially if your trial becomes an error.

[edit] Also, building, launching, and operating spacecraft are a lot more like bridge building and other non-software engineering projects. Each spacecraft may be unique, but they're made up of well-understood parts that go together in well-understood ways using time-testing engineering practices that make simulations and modeling truly useful and big-design-up-front feasible. We don't have much of that in software engineering yet, so trial-and-error is still a necessary tactic.

Compared to that, the movie Gravity's budget was $100 million.

Yes but look at all that HD footage of space they got...very impressive....

Yes, and also of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. The major bulk of the budget might have gone into that :).

Its cheaper than budget of movie Gravity.

MOM is ISRO's first inter-planetary mission. I've been following ISRO MOM since its launch - those orbit raising manoeuvres and Trans-Mars Injection were a nail biting experience :) Wishing them best of luck. Eagerly waiting for September 2014, for Mars orbit insertion.

Here's a nice interactive animation of NASA MAVEN and ISRO MOM spacecrafts. It fetches real-time data from NASA JPL HORIZONS ephemerides:

http://sankara.net/mom.html

By the way, for space/rocket enthusiasts out there - ISRO will be doing a sub-orbital test of their next gen "monster rocket" GSLV Mk3[1] in June. It will carry a Crew Module[2] as payload. This will be interesting.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_Satellite_Launch...

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Orbital_Vehicle

In highly developed countries there is a lot of discussion about the large disparity between the poor and the rich, but India seems to dwarf just everything by orders of magnitude. Every time I read about India's space program I am just unable to comprehend how a nation can at the same time fly to Mars and have a large part of their population live in slums.

UPDATE: I just want to clarify - I don't want to judge this as good or bad, I just want to express that I am unable to bend my mind around that.

The reason people in my country are poor is because of the government's economic policy. India is a very resource rich country otherwise. The country still recovering from its earlier backward economic policies [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Indi...

Response to having a space program while having poverty: http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission-Pove...

Please scroll down a bit because the awesome part comes after the subhead: Why India needs a MARS program.

Is that supported by the majority of the population? Naively I would expect that people would prefer immediate improvements over long term benefits.

Seriously guys, how can you downvote a question like that? It's a real question with a real answer and not irrelevant in this context.

India does have a lot of domestic and economic policies to bring people out of poverty. The said policies however are at the mercy of politicians who are corrupt and do not deliver.

India spends 0.2% on space exploration and 12% on defence. If you want to complain about misaligned priorities complain about our defence that takes up the most resources but does very little indigenous development rather than our space program that costs next to nothing but develops a lot of indigenous technology.

Thats an awesome article. ISRO can be an inspiration not just to young kids but many other private/government agencies in doing technologically advanced things.

> I am just unable to comprehend how a nation can at the same time fly to Mars and have a large part of their population live in slums.

It's a matter of priorities. Nations seem to want to spend money on looking impressive and technologically advanced to other nations and place that as a higher priority than their own citizens. Historically, space programs are also used to remind their neighbors that 'hey, we can put a robot in orbit of a rock millions of miles away, we can sure as hell put a bomb on your door step.' That's who they're trying to impress and what they're trying to drive home.

Fuck the poor seems to be something of a universal position.

by that logic, we indians should stop all progress wait for every poor person to reach at-least middle class and then bring technologies into our country. sounds to me pretty short sighted approach. What if instead of that we teach poor kids and create tomorrows "astronauts" and ISRO scientists.

Really? Suggesting that India not spend so much reminding Pakistan and China that they can drop a nuclear weapon on them anywhere they feel like it is the same as saying India should spend no money on anything except giving people money.

Interesting.

Sorry, I choose to ignore "war" rhetorics. If China wants to drop "nuclear" bomb it will. Our low-cost attempts at reaching "Mars" will not stop it . "MAD" policies have a limit as shown in "cold war", diplomacy has more merits :)

That's a rather naïve point of view. Try to replace "space program" with something else that isn't immediately saving lives - such as any kind of art.

This question is getting tiresome. ISRO gathers data on crop yields, irrigation, forest cover, and weather, all of which benefit regular Indians. ISRO is why India is on the verge of launching it's own GPS system. ISRO is one of the cheaper options for satellite launches worldwide. ISRO is profitable. None of that was visible when India's space program started. The same criticisms would have applied even back then, so perhaps you should cut them a little slack on this project, which costs all of $75MM by the way.

There are poor and downtrodden in about every country of this world. Yet most residents will more readily question how a neighboring country handles this situation than of their own.

I do not know of any country which does space launches can claim there is no poverty, or need, within their borders.

There are multi billion scams exposed once every month. The money spent on space exploration is negligible for people to make a big fuss about it.

And https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India

> India's national space agency ISRO would be the fourth after agencies in US, Russia and Europe to have undertaken a successful mission to the red planet.

Good to see this among all the political slugfest going on in India at the moment.

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