Mars missions! ISRO and NASA satellites successfully enter orbit, and send back interesting images.

OK, so this is not strictly about my candidature at Mars One, but it is an exciting news about exploration of Mars, so I wanted to post a bit about it.

On 22 September 2014, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft, of USA's National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), successfully entered Mars orbit. Then, on 24 September 2014, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM, also informally called "Mangalyaan"), of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), successfully completed its Mars orbit insertion.

Both the orbiters aim to study the red planet. NASA's MAVEN will carry out a first study of Mars' "tenuous" upper atmosphere, and try to determine how Mars lost its atmosphere and water (presumed to once have been substantial). ISRO's MOM, on the other hand, is mostly a technology demonstrator mission, and will help in "developing technologies required for design, planning, management and operations of an interplanetary mission". It also has some science objectives, like sensing for methane on Mars (and determining whether methane, if any, is of biological or geological origin); mapping the planet's surface composition and mineralogy; study Martian upper atmosphere; etc.

I do not want to bore anyone with too many details; they can find all those from reliable sources. But it is an exciting moment, especially for India (as ISRO has a successful interplanetary mission - in the first shot). ISRO now joins NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Soviet space program, in the select group of space agencies with successful missions to Mars.

On 24 September, all Indian news channels were abuzz with this news, and it was a proud moment for the whole country. Though some people's pride skyrocketed into blatant arrogance, and on NASA's Facebook page, many Indians have now started posting about how ISRO is more advanced than NASA, just because it is the first agency to be successful on its first attempt at a Mars mission! LOL, they obviously know little. As I read in another comment, ISRO scientists and engineers have been successful not only because of their own hard and smart work, but also because they are "standing on the shoulders on giants", i.e. the first few failing missions provided us with valuable insights and learning, helping in making later missions reach success. Also, ISRO's MOM mission was successful in part due to the telemetry and tracking support from NASA's Deep Space Network stations located at Goldstone (USA), Madrid (Spain) and Canberra (Australia), and South African National Space Agency's ground station at Hartebeesthoek. Science and technology is a global endeavor, and more than arrogance or competition, we need respect and co-operation.

Anyway, the orbiters soon started beaming back interesting data. Some of images which were made public are shown below:

MAVEN spacecraft's first Mars observations, via the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument (false-color). Captured from an altitude of 36,500 km.

First Mars image released by ISRO. Captured by the Mars Colour Camera (MCC) on-board the Mars Orbiter Mission. Altitude of 7300 km; spatial resolution of 376 m.

Second Mars image released by ISRO. Captured by the Mars Colour Camera (MCC) on-board the Mars Orbiter Mission. Altitude of 8449 km. The Martian atmosphere can be seen.

First global image of Mars released by ISRO. Captured by the Mars Colour camera on-board the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft.

Let's hope that these and other space missions are successful, and they all help us to know more about this wonderful Universe! But just imagine... If the whole world was united into a single country, with a single space agency, we would have achieved so much more... [Yeah, the world as a single nation also means a single central government, a single currency, a single set of defense forces (for maintaining "internal" disturbances), etc. And hopefully, less or no wars.]

:)

This blog completes a year!

Well, nothing much, but yeah, it is something... This blog was started on 2 September 2013, with my first post: "DO YOU WANNA GO TO MARS???". So it has completed 1 year and 2 days!

But I admit, my activity on this blog has been quite low, with months passing between some posts. This is only my 13th post. I will try to be more regular now.

As far as the viewer statistics go, it is not much impressive... a little over 500 views till now. But what surprises me is that a large chunk of viewers is from the USA, as shown in the all-time audience statistics section in my account...

I wonder how many people (other than myself) have actually read a full post... LOL.

Any way, I am happy that this blog has continued till now, and was not lost into oblivion because of my laziness. I hope my Mars One astronaut candidature also continues into the further rounds!
:)

The global university competition for a payload on the 2018 Mars lander, and Mars One's request for its popularization.

As described in my last post, Mars One aims to launch a lander in 2018, that will land on Mars in 2019 and operate there for up to 1 Earth year (i.e. till 2020). It will be based on the successful 2007 NASA Phoenix lander, and its prime contractor will be Lockheed Martin. It will have 8 payloads, some of which aim to demonstrate certain key technologies necessary for a permanent human settlement on Mars. The total payload mass of 44 kg will be allocated as follows:

1. Water extraction (10 kg)
2. Soil acquisition (15 kg) 
3. Thin film solar power demonstrator (6 kg)
4. Camera system (5 kg)
5. Open for random proposals from the highest bidder (2 kg)
6. Open for random proposals from the highest bidder (2 kg)
7. Educational payload (2 kg)
8. Winning university experiment (2 kg)

The last payload will be designed and developed by the winning team of a global university competition.

On 23 July 2014, Mars One sent an email to all its astronaut candidates, part of which is shown below:

I had checked the Mars One community website (community.mars-one.com), where the competition entries were displayed. Till end-July 2014, there were less than 20 entries in this competition, which was kind of disappointing, as it was a global competition for a payload on something that would land on Mars. Any competition like this should easily attract more than 50 entries from all over the world. Of course, Mars One has its share of skeptics, who think the whole idea of a private not-for-profit organization aiming to send humans on one-way trips to Mars, is laughable. Many would consider even this 2018 lander mission as almost impossible, as it would require funds of more than a hundred US dollars, which Mars One is yet to secure. But maybe the reason for low participation in this competition was lack of advertising.

In beginning August 2014, I went to the web-page for registration in this competition. They had not mentioned the application deadline anywhere, so I emailed Mars One, inquiring about the application deadline, and also whether they could send me some posters in hard-copy (or soft-copy which I could print) that I could send to universities in India. They replied, saying that the application deadline is 31st August 2014, and though they did not have any posters, there was a lot of information in the "Request for Proposals" and the "Proposal Information Package", whose links they had provided in the email.

31 August was quite near, so if I had to advertise this competition, I had to do it soon. I thought of designing and printing the posters myself, and then sending them by speed-post to reputed Indian universities for engineering and science (e.g. Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Science, National Institutes of Technology, etc.). But when I calculated the total cost of doing all this, it proved to be too much. Even if I printed the posters on ordinary A4 size paper (instead of professional poster printing on large size, as I was thinking earlier), and sent the copies to around 50 universities, the total cost would be more than Rs 2,500. That was kind of beyond my budget for this purpose. I thought of reducing the number of universities to around 10, but what would be the result in sending posters to so few universities? Finally, I decided that there was no need to actually print the posters and send those hard-copies to universities by post. It would be much quicker (and have zero cost) if I just emailed a PDF file of the poster to the universities, and requested them to take its print-out and put it up on their notice boards.

The poster I designed is shown in the image below:

In the beginning, I emailed this poster to the director of institute and head of each department in the Indian Institute of Science and the 7 old Indian Institutes of Technology (the top 8 universities in the country). But that took too much time, and I had to ensure that the emails reached all universities latest by mid-August. So for the other universities, I sent the email only to the institute directors. In all, I emailed the following 54 Indian universities:

1. Indian Institute of Science.
2. Indian Institutes of Technology (16 in no).
3. National Institutes of Technology (30 in no).
4. Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (5 in no).
5. National Institute of Science Education and Research.
6. Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology

I also got a print-out of the poster put up on the notice board of my college (Rizvi College of Engineering, affiliated to the University of Mumbai).

In addition, I also emailed the following 3 foreign reputed universities:

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2. California Institute of Technology
3. University of Oxford

I wish I could email more universities, but there was not enough time. Any way, 58 universities and colleges seemed a decent enough number. If my poster inspired even a single person to participate in this competition, my effort and time invested in this task would not go to waste.

After the application deadline of 31 August 2014 passed, I saw that there were 3 entries (out of a total of 35) from the above universities! The participants and universities are listed below:

1. Chandrakant Kaushal, from the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.
2. Biplob Kumar Nandy, from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.
3. Kartikay Tehlan, from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Of course, there is no way to be sure that the above 3 participants got to know about this competition from my poster... they may have got the information from some other source. But it is very much possible that they got the info from my poster which was printed and put up on the notice boards in their institutes.

Success!!

:)