Thursday 25 September 2014

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.]
:)

No comments:

Post a Comment