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Convergence of talents: Modi must join hands with Musk for a shot at Mars

Convergence of talents: Modi must join hands with Musk for a shot at Mars

Narendra Modi and Elon Musk

Narendra Modi and Elon Musk

By Rajendra Shende,

“A one-km auto rickshaw ride in Ahmedabad takes Rs 10 and India reached Mars at Rs 7 per km, which is really amazing,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi emphasised the achievement in his speech in New York in September 2014.

He was speaking about the inter-planetary plan of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) that has disrupted space technologies.

Elon Musk, a dangerously daring dreamer, at that time had a blueprint of a Martian journey on the drawing board of his SpaceX office in California. He not only wants to just send man to Mars, he wants to colonise it. He has planned on taking one million willing people from our blue planet Earth to the red planet by 2022, a journey of 650 million kilometres. To achieve this objective, he has to make the journey affordable and safe.

“Everything about Mangalyaan (ISRO’s space craft to Mars) is indigenous. We reached Mars at a smaller budget than a Hollywood movie (“Gravity”),” Modi stated smugly, adding that “India is the only country to reach Mars on its first attempt. If this is not talent, then what is?”

Indeed, India’s Mars spacecraft catapulted the country into an elite club of three nations, that too at just $74 million. That was a tenth (about $670 million) of NASA’s Mars mission “Maven” that entered the Martian orbit just two days before Modi’s statement.

Surely, Elon Musk was listening to Modi. It must have been a shocker for him because his project to colonise Mars had, and still has, the same objectives as ISRO’s — to reduce space transportation and pay-load carrying costs.

Within the next three years SpaceX developed a family of Falcon-series launch vehicles and the Dragon spacecraft, both of which deliver payloads into the Earth’s orbit at low cost mainly because Musk is able to bring back the launch vehicle for reuse.

During the same three years, ISRO became one of the world’s top space-runners. It is now a technology giant that is championing and taming space launches. It is no longer just a government-funded agency but a commercial venture that can launch other countries’ satellites through its massive launch vehicles — the GSLVs and the PSLVs. These are capable of carrying heavy payloads of satellites into space.

The ambitions, aspirations and potential of ISRO and Space X have started to demonstrate amazingly clear similarity.

When Space X was busy announcing the contract with two private individuals to send them in a Dragon spacecraft around the Moon, ISRO had already fired its PSLV and launched 104 satellites into space from a single vehicle. While Moon tourism is Space X’s business proposition, taking other countries’ satellites into space is ISRO’s.

Of the 104 satellites launched at one go, a whopping 96 belonged to the US, which paid India for the launch. The satellites, released in rapid-fire fashion every few seconds from a single rocket as it travelled at 30,000 kms an hour is like testing the limits of technology.

On January 12, 2018, ISRO soared again. This time it launched 31 satellites during a single mission that included three of India’s and 28 of other countries. When the last of the satellite was ejected, it was the 100th satellite of ISRO.

A month later, on February 6, 2018, Elon Musk recaptured the headlines as the Falcon Heavy 9 vehicle, the most powerful ever developed after the one that took man to moon, had carried a payload of his Tesla Roadster with dummy driver into space and toward the Asteroid belt.

It was sort of a gimmick and fun, as per Musk. However, more importantly, the mission was able to bring back to the earth two of the three launch vehicles and they were recovered. The same did not happen with the third vehicle.

ISRO has also announced that it is planning a flight with a “dummy crew module”, which is part of a programme for the development of critical technologies that it seeks to develop as part of its “human space-flight programme”.

Now is the time for Modi and Musk to collaborate as equal partners, particularly under Modi’s pet project of “Make in India”. Both of them need to recognise this as there are not only excellent convergence of the attributes and traits between Space X and ISRO, but also between Musk and Modi.

All of Elon Musk’s projects — electric cars that have captured the imagination of almost all governments, lithium batteries that can break long-standing barriers for solar energy, Tesla Solar Roof Tiles that can turn every home into a power plant, car elevators and Underground Tunnels that will drastically reduce use of fossil fuels, Hyperloop for sustainable transport — are all path-breaking innovations that can make dependence on fossil fuels history.

Modi has a unique opportunity for de-politicising climate change and space exploration, and take global leadership by partnering with Musk. It would in turn help Indian aspirations of eradicating poverty and making gainful employment.

(Rajendra Shende is Chairman, TERRE Policy Centre, and Director, UNEP. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at shende.rajendra@gmail.com)

—IANS

NASA, Microsoft team up to bring you closer to Mars

NASA, Microsoft team up to bring you closer to Mars

marsWashington : (IANS) The US space agency and tech giant Microsoft have teamed up to create “Destination: Mars”, a guided tour of Mars using the same Hololens headset technology that helps scientists plan the Curiosity rover’s activities on Red Planet.

It will offer people a guided tour of an area of Mars with astronaut Buzz Aldrin this summer in an interactive exhibit using the Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality headset.

“Mixed reality” means that virtual elements are merged with the user’s actual environment, creating a world in which real and virtual objects can interact.

The “Destination: Mars” exhibit will open at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s visitor complex in Florida this summer, the US space agency said in a statement.

Guests will “visit” several sites on Mars, reconstructed using real imagery from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover, which has been exploring the Red Planet since August 2012.

Aldrin, an Apollo 11 astronaut who walked on the moon in 1969, will serve as “holographic tour guide” on the journey.

Curiosity Mars rover driver Erisa Hines of JPL will also appear holographically, leading participants to places on Mars where scientists have made exciting discoveries and explaining what we have learned about the planet.

“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualisation producer at JPL.

“Destination: Mars” is an adaptation of OnSight, a Mars rover mission operations tool co-developed by Microsoft and JPL.

 

A pilot group of scientists uses OnSight in their work supporting the Curiosity Mars rover’s operations.

“We’re excited to give the public a chance to see Mars using cutting-edge technologies that help scientists plan Curiosity’s activities on Mars today,” added Jeff Norris, project manager for OnSight and “Destination: Mars”.

“While freely exploring the terrain, participants learn about processes that have shaped this alien world,” he added.

Abigail Fraeman, a Curiosity science team member at JPL, uses OnSight to make recommendations about where the rover should drive and which features to study in more detail.

Recently OnSight helped her and a colleague identify the transition point between two Martian rock formations which they would like to study in further detail.

By utilising the same technologies and datasets as OnSight, “Destination: Mars” offers participants a glimpse of Mars as seen by mission scientists.

“By connecting astronauts to experts on the ground, mixed reality could be transformational for scientific and engineering efforts in space,” Norris said.

As NASA prepares to send humans to Mars in the 2030s, the public will now be able to preview the experience the astronauts will have as they walk and study the Martian surface.