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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 20 2017, @01:22AM   Printer-friendly
from the Venus-or-bust dept.

India plans to send a lander or another orbiter to Mars, and an orbiter to Venus:

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) may put a lander on Mars in 2021 or 2022 and send an orbiter to Venus shortly thereafter. "The government has given us a go ahead for the planning of the missions," ISRO Chairman A. S. Kiran Kumar in Bengaluru told ScienceInsider.

India was the first nation to successfully reach the Red Planet on its first attempt when the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also known as Mangalyaan, entered orbit in 2014. The spacecraft continues to beam data back to mission control in Bengaluru; one of its stunning images of Mars graced the cover of last November's issue of National Geographic. But the "technology demonstrator," as ISRO calls MOM, has delivered only minimally on science expectations, critics say. For example, its methane sensor apparently has failed to detect methane plumes in the martian atmosphere. "Mangalyaan was a marvel in engineering, but no exciting science came out of [it] since the experiments and instruments themselves were mediocre," says U. R. Rao, chairman of ISRO's science advisory committee and a former ISRO chief. "Small instruments give small science," he says.

The Indian government gave the Mars reprise a green light in its 2017 budget proposal released this month. ISRO is promising a major science upgrade for its second mission, which it plans to undertake with France. "The next step has to be a lander. A lander on Mars is not easy, but it will be interesting to undertake," says Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), France's space agency, in Paris.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @03:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @03:26PM (#469275)

    If I were running a space agency and our first Mars mission was successful? I'd be thinking "quit while you're ahead", and prioritizing, say, asteroid exploration. Venus is cool, too -- it's no less a death-trap for probes than Mars, but the difference is (a) you haven't already done that, and (b) it's a more obvious death-trap, on paper, than Mars, so lower expectations. And it's not like there isn't plenty of real science to do there.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @10:53PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday February 20 2017, @10:53PM (#469479)

    - We are not wasting our money with me-too missions! Planets, moons, asteroids and comets are has-been. Sad! So we're putting a lander on the Sun!
      - But sir, it's way too hot to land there...
      - No worries, folks. Trust me, it's all planned. We'll land at night!

    (It didn't start with the specific tone it ended up with. Can we stop living in a parody, yet?)