India reaches Mars

[Rorschach]

India's Mars satellite successfully enters orbit, bringing country into space elite
theguardian.com, Wednesday 24 September 2014 14.22 AEST

India has become the first nation to send a satellite into orbit around Mars on its first attempt, and the first Asian nation to do so.

Mission control in the southern Indian city of Bangalore received confirmation of the success at 7.41am Wednesday, local time. The satellite Mangalyaan had entered the orbit of the red planet 12 minutes earlier, but the message needed to traverse the 400m miles (650m km) to Earth.

India now joins an elite club of nations who have successfully carried out interplanetary space missions, and has scored a significant point in its rivalry with China.

The prime minister, Narendra Modi, who won power in May in a landslide victory, was in Bangalore with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) watching the operation.

“We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and innovation,” Modi said, as scientists celebrated.

“We have navigated our craft through a route known to very few,” Modi said, congratulating the ISRO team and “all my fellow Indians on this historic occasion”.

Modi, who travels to the US to address the United Nations later this week, called for further efforts “for challenging, the next frontier”.

The mission has led TV bulletins and filled front pages. It has been mentioned in the prayers of temple priests and even on special emails sent out to parents of exclusive nursery schools in Delhi. Tens of millions of people across the country followed the progress of the craft live.

There was a a significant chance of failure. Of 51 previous attempts to reach Mars, more than half failed.

“Just getting there is a big, bold statement. Succeeding would be a giant one about India’s place in the region and in the world,” said Pallava Bagla, a high-profile science commentator, on Tuesday.

Mangalyaan, which means “Mars craft” in Hindi, took off from the island of Shriharikota, off India’s eastern coast, 10 months ago. The 3,000lb (1,350kg) device first headed for an elliptical orbit around Earth, after which a series of manoeuvres and short burns of its rocket engines sent it on towards Mars.

ISRO scientists successfully tested the main engine on Monday and performed a course correction that put the low-cost project on track to enter the red planet’s orbit. Reducing the craft’s speed from 13.7 miles per second was the key challenge.

“It has covered 98% of the distance but the last 2% is the tricky bit,” Bagla said before the successful entry. “If it is too fast it will fly by Mars and be lost in space. If it is too slow it will crash into the planet.”

The insertion exercise began shortly after 4am local time with the critical moment coming just over three hours later when rocket engines were ignited.

Some have questioned the $70m (£43m) price tag for a country still dealing with widespread hunger and poverty. But India defended the Mars mission by noting its importance in providing hi-tech jobs for scientists and engineers and practical applications in solving problems on Earth.

Last year the UK allotted £80m to developing joint space missions with China and India. Modi aims to establish India as a bigger player in the £200bn space technology market, even as neighbouring China gives stiff competition with its bigger launchers.

Commentators said India could go further. “We have a threshold capability but we don’t go beyond that for the simple reasons that our economy is not doing well,” said Manoj Joshi, a Delhi-based analyst. “The model is very successful, the space guys have done outstanding work but we are just not investing enough.”

Success makes India the fourth space power after the US, Europe and Russia to orbit or land on the red planet. The cost of the Indian effort is a tenth of that of the Nasa mission that put a satellite into the orbit of Mars on Monday.

Nasa’s much bigger Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission aims to help scientists understand what happened to the water on Mars and the carbon dioxide in its atmosphere several billion years ago. How Mars lost its atmosphere is one of science’s biggest mysteries.

The Indian project aims to study the surface and mineral composition of Mars, and scan its atmosphere for methane, a chemical strongly tied to life on Earth.

The United States had its first successful Mars mission with a 1964 flyby by the spacecraft Mariner 4, returning 21 images of the surface of the planet. The former Soviet Union reached the planet in 1971, and the European Space Agency in 2003.

On Sunday, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a hardline affiliate group of Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, offered ritual prayers in Delhi for the mission. The leader of the group said success would prove that India “has regained its status of superpower of the world”.

Pretty soon we'll be watching Star Trek starring Captain Mahindra B Chapati.

[Super Nova]

Astronauts may be put into coma for mission to Mars

Last updated at 12:01AM, October 7 2014



It sounds like a plotline from a sci-fi movie: a spacecraft hurtling millions of miles through the cosmos carrying a crew of comatose astronauts strapped upright in their berths.

Yet, Nasa, which aims to land the first humans on Mars in the 2030s, is giving serious consideration to the idea of placing its planetary pioneers in a state of stasis — akin to hibernation — to get them there.

By cooling the core body temperature and slowing the metabolism, astronauts could be placed in deep-sleep mode to get them through the taxing 180-day journey with fewer physical and psychological challenges, while also allowing Nasa to reduce the costs of spacecraft construction, fuel and food. “This is one of the options that’s going to enable humans to get to Mars faster, cheaper and sooner,” said John Bradford, president of Spaceworks Enterprises Inc, an aerospace engineering company contracted by Nasa to design a capsule capable of sustaining astronauts in stasis.

Films such as Alien have long depicted space travellers making epic voyages while in suspended animation; a fictitious bodily state in which the metabolism is reduced to zero and all cellular activity is halted by freezing. Stasis, however, stops short of suspending life and, since 2003, has been widely used in the treatment of patients who have suffered traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries, heart attacks or strokes.

By infusing patients with cooling intravenous fluids, placing them on chilled gel pads, or having them inhale evaporative gases, doctors can induce therapeutic hypothermia, in which the core body temperature is reduced to between 32C and 34C (89F to 93F) and the metabolism is slowed, thus minimising the risk of tissue damage following a period of insufficient blood flow.

The method has been used to treat tens of thousands of critically ill patients, including Michael Schumacher, the retired Formula 1 driver who suffered severe brain injuries in a skiing accident last year.

It is typically employed for a maximum of one week. However, funded by a $100,000 grant from Nasa, Spaceworks is looking into the feasibility of longer-term use in astronauts journeying to Mars — a distance that varies from 34 million to 250 million miles (55 million to 400 million km) — and which could last for six months. One astronaut would remain conscious to tend to the crew and spacecraft.

A robotic arm would be used to deliver low-level electrical pulses to key muscle groups, to prevent withering, and the astronauts would be fed intravenously with liquid nutrients.

By having the crew immobile, the need for food, water, galleys, entertainment, clothing, gym equipment and living space could be reduced threefold, Spaceworks’ study found, and the size of the spacecraft itself reduced by four fifths. “This is something people have seen in movies, but we’re talking about technology that’s already real. It’s happening in hospitals every day, saving lives, and Nasa can benefit by adapting it,” said Mr Bradford. “We see no competing issues, no showstoppers. Hopefully, this will be the way mankind goes to Mars.”

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/worl ... 228756.ece

[Neferti]

TOTALLY Blonde question.

WHY does the USA waste taxpayers monies, chasing "aliens" in outer space?

WHY do current Engineers think that the Egyptians (and even further back) were less intelligent then they are now with all the current technology? They all seem to be "amazed" that buildings that have lasted many many centuries must have been made by people LESS intelligent than the current lot.

Innovation is not an American thing. Nor is intelligence.

[boxy]

TOTALLY Blonde question.

WHY does the USA waste taxpayers monies, chasing "aliens" in outer space?

It is the new frontier. Successful societies need space to expand into and exploit. Without it (or a fundamental change in human nature) we stagnate.

WHY do current Engineers think that the Egyptians (and even further back) were less intelligent then they are now with all the current technology?

Ancient Egyptians weren't "less intelligent" than current humans. Show me someone reputable who thinks they were

[AiA in Atlanta]

TOTALLY Blonde question.

WHY does the USA waste taxpayers monies, chasing "aliens" in outer space?

It is the new frontier. Successful societies need space to expand into and exploit. Without it (or a fundamental change in human nature) we stagnate.

WHY do current Engineers think that the Egyptians (and even further back) were less intelligent then they are now with all the current technology?

Ancient Egyptians weren't "less intelligent" than current humans. Show me someone reputable who thinks they were

You are confusing "intelligence" and "consciousness."

Example: intelligent Nazi doctors who were low in consciousness. Consciousness evolves. We are getting spiritual here, which you won't like