Wired News: India’s Cut-Price Space Program
[...] I arrived at ISRO on the heels of an announcement that NASA will shed some of its historic reluctance to cooperate with India after tension during the Cold War and contribute a cluster of instruments to the probe’s design. There is hope that the maps produced by the mission might one day help locate a moon base or search out minerals to be shipped back to Earth.For two days I traveled around Bangalore to different research facilities, administrative buildings and security check posts. The agency is awash in chaos. In typical Indian government style, scores of clerks, press officers and executives fought a seemingly unending battle against mounds of bureaucratic paperwork inside the space agency’s administrative center. Despite being the public face of the Space Age, ISRO has yet to accept the marvels of computer filing systems, as most of the organization’s records are still kept by hand. Every officer I interviewed spoke from behind piles of color-coded folders that resembled medieval fortifications.
Nonetheless, ISRO was the first real technology player in this bustling city, and, despite the slow wheels of government, it exemplifies the ideals of India’s now-huge IT sector: provide services to the rest of the world at a fraction of the price. [...]
India Rolls it’s own Space Tech
[...] Shooting the Moon: Some time in early 2008, ISRO plans to launch the Chandryaan-1, an orbital space satellite designed to map the surface of the moon. Since NASA proposed a new initiative to use the moon as a starting point for an eventual manned mission to Mars, India has stepped forward to help out. Chandrayaan-1 will begin a two-year mission where it will aim to send back millions of high-quality images for scientists around the globe to ponder. Just 100 kilometers above endless miles of dusty planes, Chandryaan will drop a miniature probe to test future technology that could one day be the proposed basis for a lunar landing where the ISRO could use its own robotic rovers. Scientists from the European Union, United States and Bulgaria have all contributed instruments to the mission. [...]
Wired did a series of articles on the India Space Program. Interesting reading, and I didn’t realize that India was the only nation outside the US that has Satelites with 1 meter resolution (The US has even better but…) Both are good reading, with different focuses. I suggest reading both.
Tags: Interesting, News, Space
