Mission Mars successful, but Mangalyaan must prove its scientific value

The high of seeing Mangalyaan and Isro make history has still not dissipated, and it will take a considerable amount of time for India to stop celebrating. And why not? With the successful insertion of Mangalyaan into the Mars gravitational orbit, India became the first country in the world to successfully conduct a Mars mission on its first go, and the first Asian country to ever successfully launch a Mars mission. Similar attempts by both China and Japan failed in the recent past. But what next for Mangalyaan? What will the Mars Orbiter do, and how soon will it start doing it? [caption id=“attachment_1729063” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Scientists celebrate at Isro[/caption] Mangalyaan is circling Mars in an orbit whose nearest point to the planet (periapsis) is at 421.7 km and farthest point (apoapsis) is at 76,993.6 km. The inclination of orbit with respect to the equatorial plane of Mars is 150 degrees and Mangalyaan takes 72 hours 51 minutes 51 seconds to make a single rotation of the planet. All the instruments (which weigh a total of 15kg in total) aboard the orbiter will be thoroughly tested out in the coming weeks, before they start their work. Mangalyaan has five instruments aboard: a camera, two spectrometers, a radiometer and a photometer. It aims to understand the process by which water was lost on Mars, measure methane levels in the Martian atmosphere, map the surface, composition and mineralogy of Mars and take images of the Martian surface. None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist. Some of the data will complement research expected to be conducted by Maven. The camera aboard Mangalyaan has already sent out its first set of images to Isro. According to this Hindustan Times report, there had been some concern because the images were expected to arrive in the afternoon but there was no news about it till evening. However an Isro official had told the newspaper that all was well. “The Mars Orbiter has started sending pictures. We have received five pictures and these are under processing” the official told the paper. There had been some criticism earlier about the Mangalyaan mission and what it hopes to achieve, especially given the smaller payload aboard Mangalyaan. As pointed out by Firstpost editor G Pramod Kumar, many thought that Mangalyaan would not contribute much scientifically and that it was a misplaced idea of symbolism that could fail. He notes: The strongest critic of the Mars mission was none other than the former head of Isro, G Madhavan Nair. “It would be a national waste,” he had told Science magazine, following the announcement of the mission by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his independence day speech in 2012. He termed it ”a half-baked, half-cooked mission being attempted in undue haste with misplaced objectives.” According to him, the highly elliptical orbit planned for Mangalyaan would keep the mission vehicle away from the planet most of the time and that its payload was too small to study Mars. Nair had said instead of a Mars mission, Isro should have focussed on GSLV, which could have helped a stronger mission and augmented India’s future space efforts. Many others also thought that the payload was too small for an ambitious and expensive mission such as Mangalyaan and that ISRO should have waited for the GSLV. There were also criticisms that the mission was launched in haste to cover up for its GSLV-failure. The BBC quoted British professor Andrew Coates, who will be a principal investigator on Europe’s Mars rover in 2018 as saying, “They’ve kept it small. The payload weighs only about 15kg. Compare that with the complexity in the payload in Maven and that will explain a lot about the cost. Of course, that reduced complexity suggests it won’t be as scientifically capable, but India has been smart in targeting some really important areas that will complement what others are doing.” However the article added that Mangalyaan’s mission to measure methane in particular, meant that the mission would address some of the biggest debates around the Red Planet and that Western scientists were also excited also to have the Indian probe on station. “This could provide insights into the planet’s history; billions of years ago, when the envelope of gases around Mars is thought to have been more substantial”, the report said. Another benefit of the Mangalyaan mission is also what it means for Isro next. “The mission could be a turning point as India can now market its status as a low-cost base for sophisticated engineering. ISRO is already launching commercial satellites for a host of Western countries at competitive costs”, said Forbes_._ However Isro will still be put upon to prove the usefulness of its Mars mission. As Kumar so aptly put it, “The criticism that the mission with an elliptical orbit and a small payload was sub-optical with limited scientific objectives will still prevail until the space agency proves its critics wrong” Check out an infographic on the Mangalyaan payload here: