Reaching For The Stars
Author : Pallava Bagla and Subhadra Menon
Publisher : Bloomsbury, Rs899
Authors Pallava Bagla and Subhadra Menon are rated as India’s best science communicators and they address the Mars Orbiter Mission in this book. But they evade certain facts, says KUMAR CHEllAPPAN
A book Reaching For the Stars: India’s Journey To Mars and Beyond authored by Pallava Bagla and Subhadra Menon (rated as India’s best science communicators) has been published by Bloomsbury India in connection with the deployment of the Mars Orbiter Mission in the Martian orbit. Time, an international news weekly, has selected India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan), as one of the best 25 scientific innovations of 2014. Mangalyaan, launched by ISRO in late 2013 and put into the Martian orbit in September 2014 through a series of complex and mind boggling manoeuvres from the Master Control Room of ISRO at Bangalore in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, finished a close second behind a revolutionary real-life hover-board developed by a California based company in Time’s list.
The Time panel which selected Mangalyaan as one of the revolutionary innovations in 2014, borrowed Modi’s description about the country’s space mission to Mars: “Building the craft cost India just $74 million, less than the budget for the Hollywood film Gravity”. According to the magazine, “Nobody gets Mars right on the first try. The US didn’t, the Russians didn’t, the Europeans didn’t. But on September 24, India did. A technological feat no other Asian nation has yet achieved”.
However, in the context of the book, the authors seem to have overlooked some facts. Mangalyaan has been placed just below the real life hover-board, a skateboard that levitates like the fictional magic carpet. It floats an inch above conductive materials like copper and aluminium. But its application is what makes it really revolutionary. Well, the hover-board will continue to linger in scientific minds for quite some time to come. Whether the global community would remember about MOM needs serious debate and discussion. No doubt, it is a major achievement by Indian standards.
Even as one reiterates that Mangalyaan, the word coined by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his 2012 Independence Day address to the nation, is a landmark event in the history of Indian space science, a question remains unanswered. Was it worth taking a mission like the MOM at this junctureIJ The book needs to address more such points. ISRO has played a significant role in the economic, scientific and social advancements made by India. The hundreds of satellite TV channels which we watch, the mobile and land phone connections, internet connectivity, e-governance and e-commerce have all been made possible because of the communication and earth observing satellites launched by ISRO. The weather forecast in the country has made tremendous progress than what was there in 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the weather forecast aired by All India Radio used to be like this: “It may or may not rain for the next three days. No special information to fishermen venturing out into the sea”. Cut to 2000 AD, the Indian Meteorological Department’s weather and cyclone forecasts are on the dot thanks to the fleet of satellites owned and operated by ISRO.
Also, the tenure of G Madhavan Nair as the chairman was marked by the massive strides made by ISRO in fields of tele-medicine and tele-education. Patients in villages could get medical consultations and diagnosis from specialists sitting in super speciality hospitals far away in metro cities thanks to tele-medicine facility brought in by communication satellites. The village resources and knowledge centres linking the farmers and fishermen to agriculture experts and fisheries scientists through satellites were revolutionary in nature. But these things came to a nought since 2010 with the elevation of K Radhakrishnan, the Kathakali and music enthusiast, to the helm of affairs. ISRO’s focus underwent a big change with programmes of top priorities getting relegated to the back burner.
The mission to develop an indigenous cryogenic engine for lifting heavy communication satellites weighing up to four tonnes got bogged down mid-way. The Chandrayaan-2, which was to be launched in 2012 got delayed indefinitely. Two successive failures of the Geosynchronous Satellite launch Vehicles within a short span of three months saw the morale of the ISRO taking a big beating. One of the launch vehicles was powered by the indigenously developed cryo engine while the other used an engine bought from Russia. The order books of ANTRIX, the international marketing wing of the ISRO was almost empty other than the launch orders bagged prior to 2009.
It was under these circumstances that ISRO thought about the Mission to Mars. The space agency had the time tested Polar Satellite launch Vehicle with 25 successive successful launches and the manoeuvring expertise gained during Chandrayaan-1 experience to boast about. The UPA-2 Government which was plagued with scams, controversies, scandals and policy paralysis needed something to show to the outside world that India is alive and kicking. The MOM offered an ideal opportunity. Thus the Mangalyaan mission started. The entire army of scientists and technologists were deployed to fabricate the spacecraft. Works for the Chandrayaan-2 mission had been half-way through when the then Prime Minister declared to the outside world about the MOM.
Though it would have been ideal to launch the Mars mission with the heavy lift GSlV launcher, the UPA Government wanted it to be done before the 2014 General Election. The mission’s low cost is how ISRO justifies the project. The only point about which they maintain silence is the fact that scientific exploration and movie production are two areas which are poles apart. Though the MOM was put into Martian orbit in September 2014, we have yet to see any news item about the mission. It is almost four months the MOM is orbiting the red planet but it is yet to make any serious observation worth its name.
Author Bagla indeed is proud of the fact that MOM bears his fingerprints but it appears that he did not address certain questions to the ISRO boss. Why is the space agency at a loss to explain the delay caused in developing the indigenous cryogenic engineIJ The country has yet to develop a civil aircraft of its own but dreams high of inter planetary missions. Why this basic contradictionIJ The United States of America forced the Russians to deny the cryogenic engine technology to India not because of the Missile Transfer Control Regime (MTCR) and the Pokhran nuclear test but only to prevent India from graduating into the big league of satellite launching market which is almost US $700 billion a year (Page 19). Bagla being a regular writer for Science, a US sponsored magazine, has his own limitations about writing some pertinent facts.
The authors emphasise that ISRO has the largest fleet of communication and earth observation satellites, but they are silent about the fact that most of the end-users in the country buy satellite pictures from foreign agencies. The quality of satellite pictures supplied by ISRO had come under severe criticism during the search and rescue operation carried out when the chopper carrying the then Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Dorjee Khandu crashed in the India-China border in April 2011. It was a group of shepherds who helped the rescue team to reach the site of the crash. ISRO had to hastily withdraw the satellite pictures of the crash site from its website!
Authors Bagla and Menon are advised that local ingenuity can not be used in space science. In a manned mission to space, about which the ISRO and science writers like Bagla are very vocal, India unfortunately has yet to cross many many barriers. ISRO has to man-rate the launch vehicle. This means that the GSlV has to fly with 99.99 per cent precision as per the flight path scripted by the engineers in all its flights. Why ISRO is reluctant to test another GSlV Mark 2 flight powered by its own cryogenic engine though it claims that the mission test-flighted in January 2014 was a success is anybody’s guess.
Bagla and Menon share with the outside world the scoop that Modi used a tele-prompter to address the nation from the Master Control Centre at Sriharikota on June 30, 2014. However, they maintain stoic silence over the clean chit issued to ISRO by the Comptroller and Auditor General over the Devas-Antrix deal. Interestingly, they don’t mention another issue. Radhakrishnan had his tenure and retired silently on December 31. Now he may be looking forward to the Padma Vibhushan honour from the President. It is for the hapless Kiran Kumar, the new chairman to carry forward the legacy left by his predecessor, a great Kathakali artiste of our times.