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ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

isro.gov.in

141–150 of 166 posts

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#141

People who keep making the (nonsense) point of space vs. better roads keep harping on how the money will be better spent on infrastructure. I looked up the Indian planning commission's budget for 2013-14 road development. Planning Commission provided an annual outlay of Rs.37,300.00 Crore for 2013-2014 for development in road sector[1]. That is more than 6 billion USD - just for improving roads, for a year. The budge…

multiply by 10 to get US labor prices

as any US software company knows

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#142
post #43

I remember when in 2012, the then PM of India had declared this project. The entire internet community came together to deride this, saying it's not possible in a couple of years and that India had better feed its hungry etc. I am a very proud Indian today. This achievement, like other by humanity (LHC in particular), will encourage me to push myself towards greatness.

> “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or…

I agree with segmondy. Instead of classifying this news as Indian achievement, we should look forward to it as world's achievement.Surely those guys had it commendable work in such constrained resource! For me, it's new frontier in science...and boy it's cheap! More the affordability, more the chances of discoveries. Remember when a useful pricey thing becomes affordable without loosing usefulness then it's innovation!

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#143
post #43

I remember when in 2012, the then PM of India had declared this project. The entire internet community came together to deride this, saying it's not possible in a couple of years and that India had better feed its hungry etc. I am a very proud Indian today. This achievement, like other by humanity (LHC in particular), will encourage me to push myself towards greatness.

> “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or…

I agree with segmondy. Instead of classifying this news as Indian achievement, we should look forward to it as world's achievement.Surely those guys had it commendable work in such constrained resource! For me, it's new frontier in science...and boy it's cheap! More the affordability, more the chances of discoveries. Remember when a useful pricey thing becomes affordable without loosing usefulness then it's an innovation!

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#144
post #82

Well Done! But $74 Million could have been spent giving toilets to Indians, so that don't have to shit in the streets.

Well Done! But the $700 billion US defense budget could have been spent giving basic health care to Americans, so that don't have to go bankrupt whenever they fall ill. [/comparison]

Both statements ring true... what's your point?

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I should rephrase. Is this mission a scientific achievement? It could be a economics/accounting/marketing/HR/logistics achievement, but what is new scientifically?

do you understand enough "science" to fathom "scientific achievement"? If the people behind the mission explained to you "science" in it and what are the "scientific achievement", would you understand them?

I think he was implying that this was largely a PR stunt.

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#146

Not only did Mom reach Mars, she also got a pretty good bargain on it. So Indian :)

My Mom is an engineer working at ISRO designing satellite components and this line totally fits! She's vacationing so I just called and gave her the good news. :-D

many congrats. i got curious what you do.. visited your site, browser threw a security exception. http://cl.ly/image/263R2V1o100F

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not big satellites in controlled orbits that are a major problem from a space junk standpoint. Mostly it's the smaller fragments that are the problem, which outnumber satellites by a huge margin. Besides which, the easier it would be to launch satellites into orbit the easier, and cheaper, it would be to launch programs for cleaning up debris and abandoned satellites. In fact, if launch were significantly cheape…

I read an article forever ago that a de-orbiting system could be as simple as a bunch of wires being shot from the satellite to the earth; gravity would tug on the wires and slowly pull the satellite out of orbit.

Atmospheric drag, too, I suspect. Especially if the wire has some sort of weight on the end of it.

Actually, that's rather like an anchor.

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, people should have listened to critics before the Titanic, the Hindenburg, the last Columbia launch, the last Challenger launch, the Big Dig, the Iraq War, the launch of the Obamacare websites, and a bunch of other large undertakings. The critics were wrong in this case, but writing them off as noise can lead to other mistakes.

With exception of the Iraq War and Universal Healthcare websites, pretty much everything was an accident. Sending an orbiter to Mars is advancing science and knowledge. Aside from the fact that this was an unmanned mission, ambitious projects mostly have an extra element of risk by definition. Inactivity due to that would be stopping advancement. Besides, India spent USD 75 million on it. It's GDP is 1.877 trillion U…

In context, many early stage startups are (or hope to be) valued more than a probe to mars.

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#149

People who keep making the (nonsense) point of space vs. better roads keep harping on how the money will be better spent on infrastructure. I looked up the Indian planning commission's budget for 2013-14 road development. Planning Commission provided an annual outlay of Rs.37,300.00 Crore for 2013-2014 for development in road sector[1]. That is more than 6 billion USD - just for improving roads, for a year. The budge…

Here is a straightforward reason that no one who claims to be some sort of economist (social or otherwise) can argue against: India has 1.2 billion people and is not particularly endowed with wealth that it can dig out of the ground. So the only way to create wealth is to turn 'sand-into-silicon' aka make productivity gains using the only abundant resource it has - the human resource. Now if this particular mission can inspire .0001% of additional population to aspire for non-manual labor employment (i.e. study STEM etc), the productivity gain from those people will pay for this mission many times over (I haven't cared to do the math here because I just want to illustrate what I thought is an obvious point which people somehow gloss over).

Re: ISRO Mars Orbiter Mission: Spacecraft successfully enters Martian Orbit

#150
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reddit AMA by 3 young ISRO engineers just after the MOM launch was pretty good. http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1ujcmo/we_are_three_i... The salary they mention is IMO very competitive with software jobs, at least at the entry level ( http://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/1ujcmo/we_are_three_i... )

Well, kind of. Remember that these are some really smart kids. The salary mentioned in the salary is equivalent to $10,000 p.a (@exchange rate of 1$ = 60 rupess). Not a lot of money at all.

That's a pretty stupid way to look at it. Compare it with salaries in India, not with USD. It's a lot of money (vs a young Software Engineer in India) if you live in a government sponsored apartment, and get other government benefits too.
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