From India, Proof That a Trip to Mars Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank

[Buster's Uncle]

From India, Proof That a Trip to Mars Doesn’t Have to Break the Bank
By SARITHA RAI  FEB. 17, 2014



India’s Mars satellite will measure methane gas, a marker of life on the planet. Indian Space Research Organization/European Pressphoto Agency



BANGALORE, India — While India’s recent launch of a spacecraft to Mars was a remarkable feat in its own right, it is the $75 million mission’s thrifty approach to time, money and materials that is getting attention.

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

“The mission is a triumph of low-cost Indian engineering,” said Roddam Narasimha, an aerospace scientist and a professor at Bangalore’s Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.

“By excelling in getting so much out of so little, we are establishing ourselves as the most cost-effective center globewide for a variety of advanced technologies,” said Mr. Narasimha.

India’s 3,000-pound Mars satellite carries five instruments that will measure methane gas, a marker of life on the planet. Maven (for Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution), weighs nearly twice as much but carries eight heavy-duty instruments that will investigate what went wrong in the Martian climate, which could have once supported life.

“Ours is a contrasting, inexpensive and innovative approach to the very complex mission,” said K. Radhakrishnan, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, in an interview at the space agency’s heavily guarded Bangalore headquarters. “Yet it is a technically well-conceived and designed mission,” he said. Wealthier countries may have little incentive to pursue technological advances on the cheap, but not a populous, resource-starved country. So jugaad, or building things creatively and inexpensively, has become a national strength. India built the world’s cheapest car ($2,500), the world’s cheapest tablet ($49), and even quirkier creations like flour mills powered by scooters.

“If necessity is the mother of invention, constraint is the mother of frugal innovation,” said Terri Bresenham, the chief executive of GE Healthcare, South Asia, who is based in Bangalore. GE Healthcare has the largest research and development operations in India and has produced low-cost innovations in infant health, cancer detection and heart disease treatment.

In India, even a priority sector like space research gets a meager 0.34 percent of the country’s total annual outlay. Its $1 billion space budget is only 5.5 percent of NASA’s budget.

ISRO has learned to make cost-effectiveness a daily mantra. Its inexpensive but reliable launch capabilities have become popular for the takeoffs of small French, German and British satellites. Although the space agency had to build ground systems from scratch, its Chandrayaan moon mission in 2008 cost one-tenth what other nations’ moon shots cost, said Mylswamy Annadurai, mission director.

The most obvious way ISRO does it is low-cost engineering talent, the same reason so many software firms use Indian engineers. India’s abundant supply of young technical talent helped rein in personnel costs to less than 15 percent of the budget. “Rocket scientists in India cost very little,” said Ajey Lele, a researcher at a New Delhi think tank, the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, and author of “Mission Mars: India’s Quest for the Red Planet.”

The average age of India’s 2,500-person Mars team is 27. “At 50, I am the oldest member of my team; the next oldest is 32,” said Subbiah Arunan, the project’s director. Entry-level Indian space engineers make about $1,000 a month, less than a third of what their Western counterparts make.

The Indians also had a short development schedule that contributed heavily to the mission’s low cost, said Andrew Coates, planetary scientist at University College London and a leader of the European ExoMars expedition planned for 2018. The engineers had to compress their efforts into 18 months (other countries’ space vehicles have taken six years or more to build). It was either launch by November 2013 or wait another 26 months when the geometry of the sun, Mars and Earth would again be perfect for a launch.

“Since the time was so short, for the first time in the history of such a project, we scheduled tasks by the hour — not days, not weeks,” said Mr. Arunan. Mr. Radhakrishnan added: “Could we pull it off in less than two years’ time? Frankly, I doubted it.”

The modest budget did not allow for multiple iterations. So, instead of building many models (a qualification model, a flight model and a flight spare), as is the norm for American and European agencies, scientists built the final flight model right from the start. Expensive ground tests were also limited. “India’s ‘late beginner’ advantage was that it could learn from earlier mission failures,” said Mr. Lele.

“It is a question of philosophy, and each country has its own,” explained Mr. Radhakrishnan. “The Russians, for example, believe in putting large amounts of time and resources into testing so that the systems are robust.”

His agency curbed costs by another technique familiar to businesses in India: transforming old technology into new. The launch vehicle was first developed in the late 1970s and was augmented several times to become the solid propulsion system currently used in its latest Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehiclelauncher.

The G.S.L.V.’s engine also dates back to the early 1970s, when ISRO engineers used technology transferred from France’s Ariane program. The same approach, which the Indian scientists call modularity, extended to building spacecraft and communication systems. “We sometimes have to trade off an ideal configuration for cost-effectiveness, but the heritage is being improved constantly,” said Mr. Radhakrishnan.

Cost savings also came from using similar systems across a dozen concurrent projects. Many related technologies could be used in the Mars project, Astrosat, an astronomy mission to be launched in late 2014, the second moon mission, which is two years away, and even Aditya, a solar mission four years out.

Systems like the altitude control, which maintains the orientation of the spacecraft; the gyro, a sensor that measures the satellite’s deviation from its set path; or the star tracker, a sensor that orients the satellite to distant objects in the celestial sphere, are the same across several ISRO missions.

“The building blocks are kept the same so we don’t have to tailor-make for each mission,” said Mr. Annadurai of the moon mission. “Also, we have a ready backup if a system fails.”

Teams also did the kind of thing engineers working on missions do around the world. They worked through weekends with no overtime pay, putting in more hours to the dollar. Mr. Arunan slept on the couch in his office through the 18 months, rereading his favorite P. G. Wodehouse novels to relieve stress. "This is the Indian way of working,” said Mr. Annadurai.

Despite its cost-effectiveness, many have argued that India’s extraterrestrial excursions are profligate in a country starved of even basic necessities like clean drinking water and toilets. Millions sleep hungry at night, critics have emphasized. They condemn the Mars mission as nothing more than showing off.

But scientists have argued that early Indian satellites paved the way for today’s advanced disaster management systems and modern telecom infrastructure. In the 1970s, cyclones killed tens of thousands of people. Last year, when Cyclone Phailin struck India’s east coast, the casualties were in the single digits. In the 1980s, television broadcasts were available in only four Indian cities, but today they are found countrywide.

The Mars mission is also having a multiplier effect on Indian industry. Companies like Larsen & Toubro and Godrej & Boyce, which built vital parts for the satellite, will use this high-tech expertise to compete for global aerospace, military and nuclear contracts worth billions of dollars. Godrej, for example, has begun making engine parts for Boeing.

Scientists have also said that space exploration and the alleviation of poverty need not be mutually exclusive. “If the Mars mission’s $75 million was distributed equally to every Indian, they would be able to buy a cup of roadside chai once every three years,” said Mr. Narasimha, the aerospace scientist, referring to the tea that many Indians drink.

“My guess is that even the poorest Indians will happily forgo their chai to be able to see their country send a rocket all the way to Mars.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/business/international/from-india-proof-that-a-trip-to-mars-doesnt-have-to-break-the-bank.html?partner=yahoofinance&_r=0

[gwillybj]

Mars Daily
The World Above and Beyond
by Staff Writers
Moffett Field CA (SPX) Feb 18, 2014

It's almost five times easier to leave Mars than it is to leave Earth or Venus. At least, that's the case for many particles in the upper atmosphere. Mars' upper atmosphere is swarming with atoms, ions and molecules actively exiting the planet's sphere of influence. The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) satellite is headed there to discover why.

"The basic goal of MAVEN is to understand what happened to the atmosphere of Mars," said Davin Larson, scientific lead for one of the MAVEN instruments. "It's not understood where the oceans and the atmosphere went to. It could have been absorbed into the regolith sank down into the dirt but it's pretty well accepted that Mars itself couldn't hide the entire atmosphere, and that most of it escaped."

An atmosphere cannot engineer its own exit. Once an atom, ion or molecule has been captured from space or created in situ, securing release from the planet's sphere of influence typically requires an accomplice. The usual suspect in these cases is the Sun.

One mechanism of freeing a captive particle is called Jeans escape. Jeans escape has nothing to do with clothing. It has everything to do with a molecule moving just fast enough to drift away. Jeans escape happens when a planetary atmosphere is heated, often by solar events. Particles that were previously content to hang around begin moving so fast that they attain escape velocity.

Another scenario of loss is photoionization. In this case, fast-moving photons from the Sun knock electrons off atmospheric particles. The affected particles then carry a positive charge. Once particles carry a charge, they are more likely to get caught in magnetic fields or picked up by the solar wind and blown away.

In the meanwhile, the newly liberated electrons bounce around and break up other molecules. This process is known as dissociation. Dissociation can result from native Martian electrons bouncing around or directly from the solar wind. Every day, the solar wind's ions and radiation belts knock the atmosphere away, particle by particle, in a process called sputtering.

Sputtering, dissociation, photoionization, and Jeans escape: any of these mechanisms can cause loss in the ionosphere, or upper atmosphere. This in turns leads to the slow bleeding away of the lower atmosphere.

In the absence of a protective magnetic field, these escape phenomena lead to atmospheric loss on a grand scale. 3.8 billion years after losing its planet-wide magnetosphere, we on Earth posit that the disappearance of Mars' air and oceans to have been largely driven by the Sun.

Measuring the loss

To examine our hypothesis, MAVEN has been equipped with four sensors that measure every aspect of the solar input. Three of them have the word 'solar' in the title: the Solar Wind Electron Analyzer (SWEA), the Solar Energetic Particles (SEP), and the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer (SWIA). Dr. Larson, mentioned above, is the science lead on SEP, an instrument named after what it detects.

Solar energetic particles (SEPs), according to Dr. Larson, "are one form of energy that can ionize and heat the gas in the upper atmosphere of Mars." SEPs can arrive as part of large and small events.

Small events would be SEPs blown by a light solar wind. Large events launch SEPs directly from the surface of the sun. Small SEP events might only sputter away molecules in the upper ionosphere, close to the boundary with space. During bigger events, SEPs can act like powerful cosmic rays and plow through everything in their path.

"The more energetic the particle, the deeper it tends to get into the atmosphere," said Larson. "There is more ionization, more excitation, more sputtering, more heating of the atmosphere."

Heating of the atmosphere gives rise to Jeans escape, which will be observed by other MAVEN instruments. Meanwhile, SEP the instrument sits on either side of the satellite's central disk. Poised at the lower margin, the SEP sensors watch patiently for the interplanetary particles that create dissociation, ionization and sputtering.

Eye of an insect

On the other side of MAVEN's golden body, protruding 1.5 meters into space, is another Solar Package instruments: SWEA. With its glistening black patina and thatched circular grating, SWEA resembles the eye of a large insect.

"There are actually two concentric bug-eye grids," said David Mitchell, SWEA's science lead, "The instrument places a voltage across the inner and outer grids to decelerate incoming electrons without altering their trajectories."

Once electrons enter the eye, an internal electric field slows them down so SWEA can observe them. SWEA establishes which way the electrons were going and how quickly, and determines if those electrons originated in the Sun or are native to Mars.

In this way, it can read the solar wind's speed and direction of the ionosphere, where particles from the Sun and Mars continually interplay, and contributing to sputtering the atmosphere away. The solar wind itself is the object of yet another instrument's examination. With its sensor always turned towards the Sun, Solar Wind Ion Analyzer will measure the speed, contents, temperature and density of the solar wind.

"SWIA is built and designed to measure the incoming solar wind ions, both upstream and after the encounter the magnetosphere of Mars," said SWIA principal investigator Jasper Halekas, "These ions provide an important energy input to the magnetosphere of Mars, and may help determine how much of Mars' atmosphere ultimately escapes."


Loss of Ionosphere and formation of the plasmasphere. Image courtesy of NASA/LASP

Forming a plasmasphere

Around the atmosphere of any planet, electrons liberated by photo-ionization can form a free-flowing cloud around called a plasmasphere. Mars' plasmasphere rotates independently from the planet, almost wrapping around it at times. Blobs of plasma trail behind Mars like two tails, blown there by the steady solar wind. The tails trail further and further behind Mars and are eventually lost to space.

While the solar wind's ions and electrons tend to remain in high altitudes near the plasmasphere, photons in the extreme ultraviolent part of the spectrum can ionize atmospheric particles all the way down to the ground.

Extreme UV (EUV) radiation may be why Mars has too many heavy isotopes of elements like hydrogen and carbon, and too little air and water. In breaking part chemical bonds, EUV may have played a part in helping the lighter bit of H2O and CO2 break away and escape.

"Knowing the amount of EUV going into an atmosphere and how that EUV varies lets scientists understand the temperature, ionization, composition, and escape rates from that atmosphere," said Frank Eparvier, EUV instrument lead.

By measuring the extreme UV in Mars' atmosphere today, and adding in data about the number of ionized molecules and their rates of escape, we may deduce how much water and carbon dioxide existed on Mars four billions years ago.

Like SEP, the EUV sensors are so-called because that's what they detect. The EUV sensors sit anchored at the bottom of two 7-meter booms. Their presence there rounds out observations of incoming solar particles in the upper atmosphere. SWIA watches the solar wind.

SWEA sorts solar electrons, counting how many charges stick Mars' atmosphere, and how deep into they penetrate. SEP detects ionizing particles and EUV senses ionizing radiation all through the upper atmosphere, brought to Mars largely by coronal mass ejections (CMEs).

CMEs, SEPs and solar wind have each played a part in divesting Mars of its atmosphere over the last 4 billion years. With its Sun, solar wind and storms instruments, MAVEN will tell us how much of each is occurring and where.

Coupled with measurements from the five other instruments on board, by this time next year we'll have a more complete picture of what's entering in and leaving the ionosphere. We'll have a better idea of what happened to 85 to 95 percent of Mars' original atmosphere, which likely supported rivers, lakes and shallow oceans. Above all, for the first time ever, we'll know much energy it takes to strip away the sky.

http://www.marsdaily.com/reports/The_World_Above_and_Beyond_999.html