Opinion Turning success into failure

Actually the end is not as unexpected as it may seem; for the last month or so the writing has been on the wall,with the only question being when. This was because a month ago a vital sensor on the craft (the so-called star sensor) had gone bad. This sensor was meant to aid the precision of the craft’s orientation towards the moon.

ISRO had a “Plan-B”: scientists had then put a gyroscope on board along with an innovative antenna-pointing mechanism to keep the spacecraft functional. By that time it had completed 3,000 revolutions around the moon and had dispatched over 70,000 images of the surface. Overall,during its 10 months of existence,Chandrayaan-1 completed 312 days in orbit,making more than 3,400 orbits around the moon,and providing large amounts of data.

But was this mission a success or a failure?

The quality of data despatched back to Earth clearly indicates that the mission has succeeded in achieving most of its technical objectives. As is now generally known,almost 95 per cent of the desired data has already been “picked up”. All sophisticated sensors onboard — the terrain-mapping camera,the radiation dose monitor,the mini-synthetic aperture radar,the hyper-spectral imager and the moon mineralogy mapper — performed accurately. Most importantly,for the first time,an Indian spacecraft reached a distance of 4 lakh km,remained there for 10 months,and successfully carried out various experiments.

The performance of the craft even after the failure of the star sensor was satisfactory. Chandrayaan-1 carried out a unique experiment along with a US craft just a week before going silent. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter,launched on June 18,2009,and Chandrayan-1 joined hands together on August 20 to look for water on the moon. Both the crafts were manoeuvred within a few dozen kilometres of each other to study a crater near the moon’s North Pole.

Naturally,one more year in space would have allowed this craft to carry out a few more such experiments and to learn more about the moon’s atmosphere. The remaining 5 to 10 per cent loss of data will certainly leave gaps in our understanding. And ISRO will have to undertake a detailed review of what happened; initial reports indicate that some catastrophic failure either in transmitter or receiving systems could likely cause the snapping of radio links.

But,if that’s all true,here’s the question that must then be asked: did ISRO over-enthusiastically overestimate the lifespan of Chandrayaan-1?

Just before India two similar missions were launched respectively by Japan and China. Japan’s Kaguya-1 was intentionally crashed on the moon’s surface on June 10,2009 after completing one year and eight months of its stay in the close vicinity of the moon. China’s craft Chang’e-1 wound up its operations on March 1,2009 after a successful stay of one year and five months.

Interestingly,both these states during the launch had claimed the designed life of their craft was a single year; they extended it only subsequently,after judging its performance in the moon’s atmosphere. Kaguya faced some difficulties while in space but successfully overcame them. ISRO could have been a bit more conservative in its statements of the mission’s life-period.

ISRO’s significant roadmap for the future shouldn’t be held hostage. It should quickly put in place the lessons learnt from this mission; Chandrayaan-2 must not be delayed. Such setbacks are hardly uncommon to scientific quests. However,when you are competing with states like Japan and China — both commercially and also otherwise — keeping the image of your programme intact is also important. Any skills at manoeuvring that ISRO possesses can’t be limited to its satellites.

The writer researches non-traditional threats to national security at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses,Delhi

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