The fakes and the real thing

India's Indian Space research organisation (ISRO) launched a mission to planet Mars on 5^th November2013 known as 'Mars Orbiter Mission' (MOM). As far as the launch was concerned, there was nothing unusual, as ISRO's workhorse PSLV rocket was used for launching, which had previously completed 24 launches. The MOM mission was it's 25^th launch.

What was unusual in this launch was the PR effort undertaken by this Government owned organization by opening a facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/isromom) on October 22^nd, 2013, dedicated to this mission. It was perhaps the best part of the effort, as behaviour of the spacecraft moving at breakneck speed above in the vast wilderness of space was actually reported to all interested Indians accurately and timely by this page. The effort was well awarded immediately as number of likes soon crossed 250, 000, a feat not easy to achieve.

The most important gain that was achieved by this web page was the tremendous awareness and interest it created amongst India's net savvy youth. There was some criticism about cost of the mission in some media. A school boy however sent a note to ISRO web page describing how much inspired he was? Because of the ISRO moon mission and this prompted a feedback from one of the netizens saying that if this mission can inspire 100 such young Indians, that gain itself would offset the mission expenditure. How true, isn't it?

As the Mars bound spacecraft successfully completed space maneuvers one after another, the ISRO web page became even more popular. But as it happens with every success, number of scrupulous web sites and web pages appeared piggyback riding on ISRO's success. The ISRO was naturally frustrated and have now published a formal notice to these unscrupulous operators and I quote:

“Caution Against Forged Social Media Profiles Floated in the Name of ISRO/Department of Space

ISRO started an official page on Facebook titled ISROs Mars Orbiter Mission (facebook.com/isromom) on October 22, 2013, to provide near real time authentic information about the programme.

It is observed that a number of pages in the social media (Facebook and Twitter) are floated in the name of ISRO / Department of Space/ Mangalyaan, etc., which have no authenticity and ISRO does not take any responsibility for any content hosted on these pages. Some of these FORGED pages are:

https://www.facebook.com/isro.org

https://www.facebook.com/pages/ISRO-Indian-Space-Research-Orgaisation/123014641053950

https://twitter.com/Mangalyaan1

https://twitter.com/ISRO_India

https://twitter.com/ISROBhuvan

Such impersonation of the organisation is construed to be a serious offence and stern legal actions against these pages/administrators of these pages are being initiated from ISRO/Department of Space to bring them to immediate closure.”

These fake facebook and twitter pages appear to have done better than ISRO's original page itself. Ironically, the FB page Isro.org has got 370000 likes, almost 80,000 more than Isro's original Mars mission page. The two fake Isro accounts on Twitter have close to 5,000 followers. These pages and updates have been giving information on the mission, media reports on ISRO and discussions, photographs and satellite pictures. The FB pages have also used the ISRO logo without authorisation. Some of them have become friends of US space agency NASA to look original. ISRO chairman commenting on these spurious web pages says: "I don't say they are giving false information, but we want to put an end to these fakes."

It is unlikely that these web sites would just give up because of ISRO's notice. That might be just the first legal step. Since filing a legal suit against owners of these web pages is also not feasible as in the first place ISRO does not even know, who are all violating or infringing on their intellectual property right, and secondly they may not be based in India at all. What legal experts say is that a legal suit needs to be filed in a jurisdictional high court against all well known service providers and unknown respondents also under a common identity, which includes any or all of the words like ISRO, MOM, Mangalyan etc.etc.

We do have a case here, which illustrates how easy it is to take advantage of any success on internet and violate or infringe on somebody else's intellectual property rights. No doubt it is a major shortcoming for the internet and needs more stringent controls on such acts.

18^th December 2013

The mother of all the sling shots

Can you imagine, what must have been the first deadly weapon that allowed a man to kill wild animals, far superior in running speeds to him from a distance or remotely, or for that matter kill or at least seriously injure, his enemy remotely from a distance. It was a simple sling. Slings are believed to have been used by Neolithic or even Upper Paleolithic people of the stone age. The bullet or shot that would be fired from this weapon was always a stone. The ancient people of Harappa civilization in India, had realised that if they could modify this sling stone bullet or a shot to a perfectly spherical shape, it was vastly superior in speed and more deadly. I have seen such perfectly spherical sling bullets or shots from a period of around 2500 BCE at 'Dholavira' archaeological museum, in the Gujarat state of India.

Now what is a sling? A sling has a small leather pouch in the middle of two lengths of cord. The shot is placed in the pouch. The middle finger or thumb is placed through a loop on the end of one cord, and a tab at the end of the other cord is placed between the thumb and forefinger. The sling is swung in an arc, and the tab released at a precise moment. This frees the projectile to fly to the target. The sling essentially works by extending the length of a human arm, thus allowing stones to be thrown much farther than they could be by hand.

Any high school physics book would tell us that for an object in a circular motion, its speed or velocity is directly dependent upon the radius of the circle in which it is rotating. In case of a sling, higher is the speed, more lethal it is bound to be. The sling dramatically increases the radius of the circle in which the shot is being rotated before it is released.

So why am I talking about slings and sling shots today? The reason happens to be the India's latest spacecraft named as MOM or Mars orbiter Mission, that is hurtling towards planet Mars, since 1 December 2013. But whey India needs a sling shot, when other countries like USA are simply launching their Mars missions directly? The problem origins with non availability of a proven large rocket in India that can do this job. Indian space scientists have only their proven work horse PSLV rocket, that can lift the Mars spacecraft all right, but can not give it the speed or velocity required.

But why do we need to give a certain velocity to the spacecraft? Would be the next logical question. The answer to that is the gravitational pull of the earth, which keeps all of us including our atmosphere earth bound. So, like a stone thrown up falls down eventually, any spacecraft sent up by a rocket would eventually fall back to earth, unless it has a velocity higher than a critical velocity of 11.2 Km per second to escape from Earth's Sphere of influence or SOI and India's PSLV rocket can not give this kind of velocity to a spacecraft that weighs more that 1300 Kilograms.

The Indian space scientists therefore looked at some other method to impart this kind of velocity to the space craft. On November 5, 2013, ISRO successfully managed to place the Mars orbiter into a near earth elliptic orbit with farthest distance (Apogee) of 23000 Km from earth. This speed of the spacecraft was not enough to impart escape velocity to it. The velocity of the spacecraft was progressively increased by firing on board rocket motors 6 times to increase the farthest point (Apogee) to roughly to two hundred thousand Kilometers from earth, which meant that now it had enough velocity to escape from earth/s gravitational pull.

To release the spacecraft from the earth's orbit, it was re oriented and the on board rocket fired it to move tangentially to the orbit. This 23 minute long engine firing, finally imparted a velocity of 11.4 Km per second to the spacecraft and it is out of the clutches of the mother earth.

ISRO says that the orbiter is now in a hyperbolic orbit and it will escape from the sphere of influence (SOI) of the Earth at 1.15AM of December 4. The SOI of the Earth extends to about 9.25 hundred thousand km from the Earth. Once it is released from earth's SOI, it would be picked up by the Sun and it would enter into a perfectly sun-centric elliptic orbit like that of a comet.

Moving on the sun-centric orbit, Mars orbiter is expected to near the Mars's SOI after about 300 days, when the on board engine would be fired again. The spacecraft would then be actually slowed down so that Mars starts influencing it with its gravity and it finally starts orbiting around it.

The spaces here are enormous and calculations needed are extremely complicated, yet the physics that was behind a sling shot released by an Harappan man 2500 years ago and release of the Mars orbiter by an on board rocket firing remains exactly same. The scales are widely different and that is why ISRO calls the release of Mars orbiter process as Mother of all sling shots. Nevertheless a very apt description.

3^rd December 2013

p.s. 

Indian Space research organization reports that the Indian space mission to Mars crossed half the total distance to the red planet from Earth on Wednesday, 9th April 2014, and was very much along the designated helio-centric trajectory. At exactly 09.50 am (IST), the Mars Orbiter Mission spacecraft crossed the mid-point of its path to Mars, thereby has travelled 337.5 million km in its elliptical orbit around the sun. It now takes four minutes and 15 seconds for a message to reach the spacecraft and return.

9th April 2014 

Latest Tweets from ISRO

*It's time for MOM to perform another planned Trajectory Correction Manoeuver
* T-Minus one hour and counting for today's TCM. 
* Yes it’s 4:30 PM now. MOM TCM2 firing should have started-Confirmation awaited from MOM.
* Confirmation signal from MOM can be received only after the antenna is reoriented towards Earth,post-firing;and of course the signal delay.
* A missive from MOM confirms the TCM2-Firing completion as planned. Team MOM is busy crunching numbers to determine the post-TCM2 trajectory.
*Mars Orbiter Mission’s second Trajectory Correction Manoeuver completed successfully. Keep Cruising MOM ! 

All this means is that MOM is now on the right path to Mars.

11th June 2014 

India's own GPS network takes shape

About 40 Km from the IT hub city of Bengaluru in south India, lies a remote hamlet known as “Byalalu.” Travelling on Bengaluru-Mysore highway, one needs to take a right turn in Kumbalgod Industrial area and then proceeding on a rather bumpy road, he can reach this sleepy hamlet with plain farm land dotted around and a typical rural setting. Readers are likely to ask a question as to why in the first place any one would like to travel to Byalalu?

Located just in the vicinity of this hamlet, only about a Km away, is India's principal communication centre for spacecraft known as deep space network. Even a casual visitor to this area would not fail to see huge white dish antennas directed somewhere in space. This campus has large antennas of 32-metre and 18-m diameter to track planetary projects such as the Mars and the lunar missions. India's first Lunar mission, “Chandrayan I” was controlled from here and the Mars orbiter mission that is likely to take off in October or early November so as to leave Earth’s atmosphere by November 27, would also be controlled from here.

A new facility was commissioned at this complex this week, that would soon become the nerve centre or the hub, of India's forthcoming navigational satellite constellation, called as Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), which would be an independent regional navigation satellite system designed to provide position accuracy better than 10m over India and the region extending about 1500 kms around India. It will provide an accurate real time Position, Navigation and Time (PNT) services to users on a variety of platforms with 24x7 service availability under all weather conditions.

In simple terms, IRNSS would be an independent positioning system like GPS that will give data on the position, navigation and time of persons or objects to a range of users. This nerve centre would become truly operational, when India's first regional navigational satellite, R1A, gets launched at midnight on June 12,2013. The satellite will be launched on the PSLV rocket from Sriharikota, on east coast of India.

This satellite would be joined by 6 more satellites to be launched within next three years to form the IRNSS constellation that will give data on the position, navigation and time of persons or objects to a range of users.

This facility houses a high stability atomic clock to keep precise time and reference, pool and synthesise navigational messages and coordinate 21 ground stations across the country. The constellation of 7 satellites in space will give positional accuracy of within 10 meters. Its users will be from aerospace, military, all transport systems, geo information of the Survey of India and also individual users. Two basic services would be available as standard Positioning Service (SPS,) one for common civilian users and second one for Restricted Service (RS) for special authorized users.

Satellites of the IRNSS constellation would be identically configured with each spacecraft weighing 1425 kg. The navigation software for IRNSS is being indigenously developed at ISRO.

1 June 2013