ISRO is scrambling to ensure that its Mangalayaan mission, which will put a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, is launched on schedule in November 2013. Or else, the mission will have to be postponed by over two years.
The respective orbits of Earth and Mars are such that a path of minimum fuel consumption is only once available every 26 months. Given an ideal launch window in November, the trip of 250 million km or so will take 10 months. Only the US, Russia and the European Space Agency have reached Mars, so this would put India into a club of four.
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ISRO's aims for a highly eccentric 500 km x 80,000 km orbit around Mars. The communications and control will be challenging. Radio waves take around 27 minutes for a round trip at the maximum Earth-Mars distance of 400 million km. Hence tricky time-delayed remote operations are required and the orbiter must also have autonomous ability to deal with unforeseen situations.
ISRO estimates the project cost at about Rs 450 crore. The orbiter, which will weigh about 1,350 kgs, will carry five scientific experiments with a total weight of 15 kgs. It will be pushed into space by a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket. It will have a solar array for power, and thrusters for control in the Martian atmosphere.
As in the Chandrayaan lunar mission, ISRO will cooperate with Nasa to design experiments. The equipment includes a colour camera, a Lyman-Alpha (LA) photometer, an exospheric neutral composition analyser, an infrared spectroscope and a methane sensor.
These will map Mars' surface and mineralogy, as well as analyse the atmosphere. The presence of methane would indicate possible organic life. The LA photometer measures the spectral line of alpha particles emitted by the sun and detects the presence of atomic hydrogen and deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in the atmosphere.
ISRO's ambitions are backed by government support. But it is not the only Indian space initiative. The private sector is also getting interested in space research. One of the more interesting ventures is Earth2Orbit, a private sector outfit that works with ISRO's marketing arm, Antrix, to provide launch services.
The company, which put its first client satellite up in February, has venture capital backing. Earth2Orbit, which has several other partners apart from Antrix, hopes to commercialise ISRO's expertise in launch vehicles, satellites and ground equipment. One of the founders, Sushmita Mohanty, claimed in an interview to New Scientist that India could target a quarter share of the global space-launch market in the next decade or so.
Eventually Earth2Orbit hopes to develop private orbital services to take tourists into orbit, on the lines of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic. Another idea that Earth2Orbit is exploring is the creation of low gravity, or micro-gravity facilities for scientific research.
Another Indian space venture, Team Indus, was inspired by the Google Lunar X Prize contest. In September 2007, Google announced that it would sponsor a space contest organised by the X Prize Foundation. The X Prize Foundation is a non-profit, which offers cash awards for specific technical achievements. The foundation has already inspired the development of the first privately-designed orbital spacecraft with its Ansari X prize.
The Lunar X prize offers $30 million in incentives to teams that land a robot on the moon by December 2015. The teams must be at least 90 per cent privately-funded but they can raise cash through any "reasonable" commercialisation.
The conditions are, the lunar robot must travel at least 500 metres on the moon's surface and also transmit high-resolution video and images. The first team to do this will receive $20 million with the second team receiving $5 million. Additional incentives are available for more specific tasks.
Team Indus, which is led by serial entrepreneur Rahul Narayan, is the only Indian outfit gunning for the prize. The launch itself depends on ISRO agreeing to offer a ride on a PSLV. This not only requires paying launch fees; it means pre-empting others in the queue.
Team Indus will have to design a robot with lunar mobility as well as a lander capable of controlled soft-landing on the moon. Most lunar missions simply crash the probe - Chandrayaan did this, for example. The soft-landing plus lunar rover combination has only been attempted by the US and the former USSR. To ensure a controlled landing, the lander must use onboard rockets to control motion direction and to brake in the moon's gravity well. Once it lands, the robot will emerge to do its roving.
The Team Indus strategy is to design the lander and rover, while staying within a weight limit of 250 kgs. It will contract out to get designs executed by engineering firms - it claims to have a commitment from at least one major. Design elements like propulsion, telemetry and communication will need help from specialised institutions and Team Indus will take the help of ISRO and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and others, where it can. Instead of government funding, it will pay for this by selling the data it hopes to gather. It will also try to raise funding through sponsorship, marketing and public appeals.
This is a fantastic effort. It is effectively a labour of love since the costs of development would probably match or exceed the prize money on offer, even assuming Team Indus wins. If it is successful, whether it wins or not, this outfit will have demonstrated the ability to do something ISRO has not even attempted.