On March 16, India took a big step toward a Mars orbiter mission with the release of its budget. The proposal itself might not be particularly revolutionary -- such missions have been flown before, if not by India -- but the planning strategies and subtext are a fascinating case study of business-as-unusual.
Although India has only recently begun a period of sustained economic growth and accelerated development, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) was created in 1969 with a decidedly Earth-centric mandate. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, one of the key early players at ISRO, answered critics who accused India -- a nation with hundreds of millions of its citizens mired in poverty -- of misplaced priorities:
What seemed foolhardy four decades ago now appears to be remarkably plausible as India looks to join the forefront of interplanetary investigation. As NASA’s planetary budget fights for its life and delays become ingrained as a fact of mission planning, India’s Mars probe’s launch date is -- in apparent violation of the first law of budgetary physics -- actually moving forward in time. Earlier plans pointed to a late-2010s or early-2020s launch, but with a recent infusion of $24 million, the mission could start its voyage as early as November of next year.
This accelerated schedule is almost comical to scientists and engineers working on instruments for more ossified space programs like NASA and ESA. In the United States or Europe, specific investigators often develop a particular instrument and then try to punch its ticket on a funded mission. Of course, this means there are always more instruments than seats on a mission, and missing the final cut leads to a holding pattern of perpetual tweaking. Ideally, these orphaned instruments have other applications and live long, productive lives as spinoff technologies. Even if they don’t, the institutional knowledge associated with an instrument in constant development means that ambitious missions can be planned to the last milligram to maximize scientific output. (And yet somehow, most missions suffer delays and budget overruns...)
The ISRO’s accelerated pace creates a very different situation: Scientists are scrambling to select the most promising instruments and rush them through the final stages of development. As recently as January, Indian scientists were brainstorming potential payloads, and the most recent reports identify a shortlist that includes the following instruments: an infrared spectrometer, a thermal emission spectrometer, a color camera, a radiation spectrometer, the Plasma and Current Experiment, the Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyzer, and the Methane Sensor for Mars. Over the next 18 months, these instruments must be miniaturized, ground-truthed, and subjected to rigorous spaceflight compatibility tests. Much of a NASA mission’s timeline is gobbled up in planetary protection procedures; it's unclear how rigorous ISRO’s microbe-scrubbing procedures are, but this step could further compress the schedule.
Most of the proposed types of instruments have been to Mars before, but the methane probe offers a fundamentally new capability and an opportunity to scoop NASA. In 2009, Dr. Michael Mumma pointed his telescopes at the martian atmosphere and made measurements that hinted atvast plumes of methane. The sentence following such a declaration should always note that these measurements have raised objections and started contentious debates, but the importance of methane as a biologically implicated gas means that Mumma’s results are worth a second, closer look. NASA is eager to fly a mission to study the martian atmosphere in more detail, but India might beat it to the punch.
But why is ISRO focusing on Mars? Is a robotic mission to Mars the best use of India’s talent and treasure, or is there some geopolitical maneuvering afoot? India is building off of the success of its Chandrayaan-1 Moon mission, which clearly identified the ISRO as an organization capable of assembling and operating a complicated space mission. India is lagging behind China in the manned space program department, and although human spaceflight is still a line item on ISRO’s budget, India seems to be distinguishing itself from its superpower neighbor by pursuing more scientifically oriented robotic missions.
Making launch vehicles and mission architectures amenable to humans -- pesky organisms that demand specific temperatures, pressures, and gas mixtures -- is significantly more complex and delivers a less immediate scientific payout. By focusing on robotic probes, India has a better chance of being globally relevant sooner, making Dr. Sarabhai’s “fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets” more achievable by the day.
