India's Martian MOM clocks up 1,000 days circling the red planet India's Mars Orbiter Mission – aka MOM – has celebrated its 1,000th Earth day in orbit around the red planet. The probe arrived on November 5, 2013 and last week ticked over into four figures. The mission cost a pittance or, as the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) puts it, MOM “is credited with many laurels like cost- …
"Still got 32% of the fuel they had after orbital insertion, 3.5 years ago.
That barely even registers as 'low' to me."
There are two kinds of people - those who panic and start looking for a petrol station when the fuel metre gets close to halfway, and those who refuse to pay attention to the flashing light because there's easily at least 20 miles left in the tank so stop nagging me. I guess the ISRO is one of the former.
As for the 1000 days, I can't help wondering what kind of distribution you might see for expected vs. actual spacecraft (and lander) lifetimes. It seems most of them either have a lifetime of 0, or survive a couple of orders of magnitude longer than planned, with not much in between.
Still got 32% of the fuel they had after orbital insertion, 3.5 years ago.
That barely even registers as 'low' to me.
Especially as their mass is now significantly lower and hence any fuel that they do have left will be able to do more..
Like kicking out several of you oversize friends when on the way back from the pub after the fuel light goes on..
It did start out with 800kg of fuel, mind, so right now the tank's at about 1.5%. They *are* running on the dregs (probably why they did the burn with the attitude thrusters rather than the main engine).
...it started out with a fully loaded mass of 1337 kg. Yes, this may be humanity's first spacecraft to rate Elite status.
I used to think like that however,
Yes they have a space program which advances science.
Yet they also have a some very poor people.
What we do as the UK is give aid to the very poor people as the Indian government isn't set up like ours in terms of welfare. What we get back is a population who is grateful for our help who one day will move out of extreme poverty.
What do you suggest? We stop giving aid and tell the Indians to do more? That's not going to work due to the culture and would leave people to die.
So the options are let people die or send aid.
It's not like we can't afford it, we just sent a 1bn aid package to Northern Ireland to help those poor nationalist terrorists.
Unionist Terrorists not Nationalist Terrorists, please keep them the right way round
I'm going to focus on the word "terrorist" as people who deem that an acceptable means of behaving are not too selective in who they kill either. There is no "right" excuse or side here.
It does???? Are you sure?
It seems it does, cf http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/engineering/11221945/UK-space-industry-behind-Rosetta-comet-mission.html:
The mission to land on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko relies on British expertise
Ok, it tries anyway :-P
Why does this come up in EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE about ISRO? It's been explained, over and over.
First off, India doesn't just receive a bag of money from the UK. It doesn't in fact receive anything resembling traditional financial aid. For the rest I'll just copy one of my previous posts on the recent GSLV Mark III launch where somebody made the same comment:
"You clearly don't understand how government finances work so lets keep this simple.
Poor people without a job don't pay taxes. Poor people without a job are also unlikely to have the means of letting their childres go to a school, meaning their children wil also be poor and without a job.
Running a (relatively cheap) space program means you can get some better educated people a good job, so they can pay taxes and send their children to school, so the children will later pay taxes as well. You can then use the more reliable source of income from taxes to help the poor.
On top of that the space program is a billboard for the nation: "Hey, look at us, look what we can do. Send some of those manufacturing contracts our way maybe?" (Since being able to build a reliable rocket means you have a high degree of control/mastery of things like supply chain management, metalurgy, engineering, precision fabrication and assembly, transport, quality assurance, etc, etc). Guess what those extra contracts do? More people (including lower wage/education) with jobs, more people paying taxes, more people sending their children to school. Thus less poverty in the future.
Poverty isn't a prolem you solve by simply throwing money at it. And just because they spend 1 billion on a space program (a tad under a dollar per person) doesn't mean they don't spend anything on poverty relief/reduction. In fact they spend well over 100 billion a year on those measures. Stopping the space program would add less than 1% to that budget. Not exactly shocking."
India also has a nuclear weapons (the reason the UK stopped giving financial aid), IRBM and ICBM development programs amongst other technology not exactly fitting the tradition image of an "impoverished" nation. If anything you should be complaining about those, not about peaceful civilian applications of technology that can help develop the nation. But simply put, the traditional view of India as an "impoverished nation" is just wrong.
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