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India Goes to Mars for Less Than 'Gravity's' Budget

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the Applied-SiddhÄnta dept.

Popeidol writes:

"In November, India took the next step in their space program by launching their Mangalyaan Mars orbiter. The orbiter won't arrive for a while yet, but they've managed to get some public attention for a different reason: the fact that the entire mission costs only 75 million dollars, substantially less than the budget for the hit movie 'Gravity.'

While the question of wages is bound to come up (it was only 15% of the budget of the project), I think we can all agree that bringing down the cost of interplanetary space travel to a level attainable by the ultra-rich is a good step forward."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:38PM

    by VLM (445) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:38PM (#1737)

    Note that its in a race with MAVEN, and MAVEN is expected to win by about 48 hours, so you can expect lots more press coverage of MAVEN, at least in the USA. Also lets just be honest, MAVEN has about six times the payload and although "mass of experiment" is not the best metric of coolness, MAVENs simply has a lot more "stuff" so its more likely to discover something cool. Statistically at least one of the two is going to fail, so at least we'll have something.

    The race has to do with ideal orbital transfers and stuff, its not some pointless political thing although you do have to wonder that MAVEN just had to be first LOL.

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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:42PM (#1744)

    "Statistically at least one of the two is going to fail"

    Statistically, both will fail at some point.

    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:48PM

      by VLM (445) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:48PM (#1754)

      True enough. One of the two will fail before meeting mission objectives would be more accurate.

      Some mars missions haven't failed yet, although eventually they will fail...

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Cactus on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:56PM

      by Cactus (32) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:56PM (#1799) Journal

      "On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by weeds on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:42PM

    by weeds (611) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:42PM (#1790) Journal
    MAVEN - Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/maven/main/ [nasa.gov]

    "... the mission will explore the Red Planet's upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind"

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:58PM

      by VLM (445) on Tuesday February 18 2014, @06:58PM (#1803)

      Yes, its a cool mission. Aside from the obvious scientific results, it seems impossible to avoid improving aerobraking knowledge by studying the upper atmosphere and they're planning these crazy "deep dip" near re-entry maneuvers to gather even more data.

      NASA needs more information about aerobraking, they've already done plenty of experimental lithobraking trials.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:22AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 19 2014, @06:22AM (#2182)

    I will use ant.