Mars is there, waiting to be reached, said Edwin Aldrin, popularly known as Buzz Aldrin, the one who took a walk on the moon with Neil Armstrong. By the time you read this, ISRO’s Mars Orbiter should have settled into its path around the red planet. And India’s membership in the small club of nations capable of doing planetary science would be established. In fact, we got our membership card on Monday afternoon IST, when Mangalyaan tested its apogee motor, which was designated to perform the orbital manoeuvre. It could have been corroded by its fuel, since it had been switched off 300 days earlier, but it ignited perfectly.
Just hours before that test burn, NASA’s Maven (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) was injected into Mars orbit. Both projects will conduct crucial atmospheric studies and the data they generate will be correlated. Maven’s orbit drops to 150 km above the Martian surface, while Mangalyaan, though about one-third the weight of the US probe, will be more than twice as far away. Even so, comparison would validate the data sets and mashing them together might see new findings. How Mars lost its atmosphere is a central question in planetary science, so the Indo-US collaboration will be closely watched for outcomes in the global scientific community.
Back in 2009, well ahead of NASA, ISRO’s Chandrayaan spacecraft had detected water molecules at the lunar pole. And last year, NASA had discovered water beneath the lunar crust, using data generated by Chandrayaan’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper.
There is a healthy complementarity in the relationship developing between India and the US in space. There can be no question of competition since the US, apart from having much more money, has first mover advantage in almost all areas, often by a span of decades. For instance, we have just sent our first orbiter to Mars, while NASA’s Viking probes had landed on the Martian surface in the 1970s. However, India is developing a reputation for unbelievably cheap space technology, which is nevertheless failsafe and delivers reliable data. As the financial muscle of the US dwindles, with the rise of China and other nations, it may make sense for the US to collaborate with India. It could retain its edge in research by using turnkey Indian technology for launches, space vehicles, communications and data gathering. In short, it could commit its resources to the ‘software’ of space exploration by outsourcing the hardware.
Take the costs of these two Mars ventures. Mangalyaan cost $75 million, while Maven was backed by a whopping budget of $670 million. The money paid for Maven’s payload – which is twice the weight of Mangalyaan’s – but more importantly, it also saved on time. Maven barely paused after it reached orbit around the earth. It had an extra Centaur rocket stage, which immediately powered it out of earth’s gravity well and launched it towards Mars. However, India’s Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which was used to launch Mangalyaan, does not have the power to place an extra stage and its huge fuel tanks into orbit. Instead, Mangalyaan stayed in earth’s orbit for a long time and used the earth’s gravity well like a slingshot to hurl itself away, firing its motor in short bursts as it orbited until it incrementally exited the earth’s sphere of influence, using a tiny amount of fuel. In effect, Maven took a direct flight, while Mangalyaan had a cheap ticket with several stopovers, and every connecting flight was a ‘red-eye’. But as the race to commercialise space intensifies, and especially as private players enter it, the cheaper option could begin to look attractive, even to market leaders.
An older project has been overshadowed by the excitement about Mangalyaan and Maven. After two years spent wandering the Martian landscape, NASA’s Curiosity rover has reached its destination and will begin to focus on scientific experiments, largely concerning the oldest question about Mars –was it ever host to life? Not the little green men of the science fiction writer’s imagination, just a few microbes would suffice to establish that we are not alone in the universe. In 1976, the Viking lander had detected carbon dioxide on Mars, the product of life on earth. Curiosity has found no carbon dioxide but significantly, it confirmed that the crater in which it had landed was probably the bed of an ancient freshwater lake. The presence of a medium like water is essential for the processes underlying life, so one can conclude that if life existed at that time, three billion years ago, it would have had a pretty good time.
This is comforting, for if the Martian ecosystem supported life once, it could probably do so again. In particular, if water ever existed on the surface, some of it may still be trapped in the crust, ready to be ‘mined’by human colonists and used to start a photosynthetic cycle which could slowly bring the Martian atmosphere closer to something breathable.
The said colonists are, by the way, only a decade away. In 2024, the Dutch nonprofit project, Mars One, will launch four people on one-way tickets to Mars. Given the huge number of applications from India, one of them could well be an Indian. The project’s promoters believe that current technology can support human colonies on Mars. But obviously the colonists would be happier if they did not have to make their entire water supply and air supply from scratch.
Whether or not Mars is colonised by Earth creatures, just understanding what happened there and why would help us deal with climate change and other vital earth matters of today. As Buzz Aldrin said, “By exploring and understanding Mars, we may gain key insights into the past and future of our own world.”
Antara Dev Sen is Editor, *The Little Magazine*. Email: sen@littlemag.com
