Tag: Roscosmos

Making sense of Luna 25

At the outset, let’s hope the unfortunate demise of Russia’s Luna 25 mission to the moon will finally silence the social media brigade that’s been calling it a competitor to India’s Chandrayaan 3 – although I wouldn’t put it past some to thump their chests over the latter succeeding where the former couldn’t. To understand why it never made sense to claim CY 3 and Luna 25 were in a race, I highly recommend Jatan Mehta’s points.

With this behind us: there are several interesting ways to slice what happened to Luna 25, beyond the specific technical points of failure on the spacecraft. Two seem particularly notable, to my mind.

First, since it became clear that Luna 25 had erred with an orbit-lowering manoeuvre on August 19, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, couldn’t communicate with it until the moon was over Russia, which in turn narrowed the window Roscosmos had to troubleshoot and fix the issue. The reason Russia had this problem is because it went to war, provoking stringent sanctions from many countries worldwide, including negating opportunities to make use of a global communications network to stay in touch with Luna 25.

On the other hand, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will have assistance from the European and American space agencies to keep track of Chandrayaan 3.

The second is that, against the backdrop of the war and the consequent sanctions, Russia’s reputation as a space power is at stake. Luna 25 was in the works for more than two decades (initially under the name ‘Luna-Glob’) before it launched. When Russian’s lander-based Fobos-Grunt mission to Mars failed in 2012 – it couldn’t perform an orbit-raising manoeuvre around earth and fell back – the country decided that it wouldn’t be able to provide a lander as agreed to ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 mission by 2015, so ISRO decided to develop its own lander (whose abilities will be tested for the second time come August 23).

(This legacy is yet another reason the coincidental attempts by Luna 25 and Chandrayaan 3 to soft-land on the moon was never a race.)

Fobos-Grunt’s failure together with other commitments further delayed the launch of Luna 25. One of these commitments was a lander for the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) ExoMars mission, to deliver a rover named ‘Rosalind Franklin’ on Mars. But ESA terminated the deal in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, postponing the mission to at least 2028. Finally, by the late 2010s, Luna 25 was ready.

Taken together, Russia wasn’t able to successfully undertake an interplanetary mission since Phobos 2 in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Due to the events of yesterday, this dubious record is now extended to 34 years – an unexpected turn of events for the country that launched the world’s first satellite. It also continues to delay the intended purpose of Luna 25 according to a Roscosmos statement: to “ensure Russia’s guaranteed access to the moon’s surface”.

Russia has also staunchly denied allegations that its economy is groaning under the weight of the sanctions imposed by the West, but its ability to recover from the failure and plan the next mission will surely be affected by limitations on what components it can import.

As the world’s spacefaring countries are getting the moon back in their collective sight, the US and China are leading the line-drawing on this occasion. But Russia – whose Luna 25 was ultimately intended as a statement that the country’s space power status is not on the decline – drew one of its own and paid a price for it.

(To whomever this message appeals, I hope filmmakers in India take note, since they have often villainised the notion of ISRO seeking or receiving help from other agencies in films and TV shows.)

Must war have consequences for scientists?

The Journal of Molecular Structure has temporarily banned manuscript submissions from scientists working at state science institutes in Russia. The decision extends the consequences of war beyond the realm of politics, albeit to persons who have played no role in Putin’s invasion and might even have opposed it at great risk to themselves. Such reactions have been common in sports, for example, but much less so in science.

The SESAME synchrotron radiation facility in Jordan, operated by CERN and the Jordan atomic energy agency and with support from UNESCO, takes pride in promoting peace among its founding members (Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority and Turkey). CERN in Europe, born in the aftermath of World War II, has a similar goal.

In fact, in the science-adjacent enterprise of spaceflight, the corresponding US and Russian agencies have cooperated against the shared backdrop of the International Space Station even when their respective heads of state have been at odds with each other on other issues. But as Pradeep Mohandas wrote recently, Roscosmos’s response to sanctions against Russia have disrupted space science to an unprecedented degree, including the ExoMars and the Venera D missions. Update, March 8, 2022, 7:14 pm: CERN also seems to have suspended Russia’s ‘observer’ status in the organisation and has said it will cooperate with international sanctions against the country.

Such virtues are in line with contemporary science’s aspiration to be ‘apolitical’, irrespective of whether that is humanitarian, and ‘objective’ in all respects. This is of course misguided, yet the aspiration itself persists and is often considered desirable. In this context, the decision of the editor of the Journal of Molecular Structure, Rui Fausto, to impose sanctions on scientists working at institutions funded by the Russian government for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes across as enlightened (even though Fausto himself calls his decision “apolitical”). But it is not.

Science in the 21st century is of course a reason of state. In various conflicts around the world, both communities and nation-states have frequently but not explicitly appropriated the fruits of civilian enterprise, especially science, to fuel and/or sustain conflicts. Nation-states have done this by vouchsafing the outcomes of scientific innovation to certain sections of the population to directly deploying such innovation on battlefields. Certain communities, such as the casteist Brahmins of Silicon Valley, misogynistic academics in big universities and even those united by their latent queerphobia, have used the structural privileges that come with participating in the scientific, or the adjacent technological, enterprise to perpetrate violence against members of “lower” castes, female students and genderqueer persons, for reasons that have nothing to do with the latter’s academic credentials.

However, the decision of the Journal of Molecular Structure is undermined by two problems with Fausto’s reasoning. First, the Russia-Ukraine conflict may be the most prominent in the world right now but it isn’t the only one. Others include the conflict in the Kashmir Valley, Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the Yemeni civil war and the oppression of Uyghur and Rohingya Muslims in South and Southeast Asia. Why haven’t Fausto et al. banned submissions from scientists working at state-sponsored institutes in India, Israel, Saudi Arabia and China? The journal’s editorial board doesn’t include any scientists affiliated with institutes in Russia or Ukraine – which suggests both that there was no nationalistic stake to ban scientists in Russia alone and that there could have been a nationalistic stake that kept the board from extending the ban to other hegemons around the world. Either way, this glaring oversight reduces the journal’s decision to grandstanding.

The second reason, and also really why Fausto’s decision shouldn’t be extended to scientists labouring in other aggressor nations, is that Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is an autocrat – as are the political leaders of the countries listed above (with the exception of Israel). As I wrote recently in an (unpublished) essay:

… we have all come across many stories in the last two  years in which reporters quoted unnamed healthcare workers and government officials to uncover important details of the Government of India’s response to the country’s COVID-19 epidemic. Without presuming to know the nature of relationships between these ‘sources’ and the respective reporters, we can say they all likely share a conflict of ethics: they are on the frontline and they are needed there, but if they speak up, they may lose their ability to stay there.

Indeed, India’s Narendra Modi government itself has refused to listen to experts or expertise, and has in fact often preempted or sought to punish scientists whom it perceives to be capable of contradicting the government’s narratives. Modi’s BJP enjoys an absolute majority in Parliament, allowing it a free hand in lawmaking, and as an authoritarian state it has also progressively weakened the country’s democratic institutions. In all, the party has absolute power in the country, which it often uses to roll over the rights of minorities and health and ecological safeguards based on science as much as to enable industrial development and public administration on its own terms. In this milieu, speaking up and out is important, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves about how much we can expect our comments to achieve.

Similarly, in Putin’s Russia, more than 4,700 scientists and science journalists recently signed an open letter protesting the invasion of Ukraine, potentially opening themselves up to persecution (the Russian government has already arrested more than 5,000 protestors). But how much of a damn does Putin give for scientists studying molecular structure in the country’s state-funded research facilities? In an ideal scenario, pinching the careers of certain people only makes sense if the country’s leader can be expected to heed their words. Otherwise, sanctions such as that being imposed by the Journal of Molecular Chemistry will have no effect except on the scientists’ work – scientists who are now caught between a despot and an inconsiderate journal.

Ultimately, Fausto’s decision would seem to be apolitical, but in a bad way. Would that it had been political, it would also have been good.Modern science surely has a difficult place in society. But in autocratic setups, there arises a pronounced difference between a science practised by the élite and the powerful, in proximity to the state and with privileged access to political power, and which would deserve sanctions such as those extended by the Journal of Molecular Structure. Then there is the science more removed from that power, still potentially being a reason of state but at the same time less “open to co-optation by the powerful and the wealthy” (source).

Is it so blasphemous to think ISRO ought not to be compared to other space agencies?

ISRO is one of those few public sector organisations in India that actually do well and are (relatively) free of bureaucratic interference. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before we latched on to its success and even started projecting our yearning to be the “world’s best” upon it – whether or not it chose to be in a particular enterprise. I’m not sure if asserting the latter or not affects ISRO (of course not, who am I kidding) but its exposition is a way to understand what ISRO might be thinking, and what might be the best way to interpret and judge its efforts.

So last evening, I wrote and published an article on The Wire titled ‘Apples and Oranges: Why ISRO Rockets Aren’t Comparable to Falcons or Arianes‘. Gist: PSLV/GSLV can’t be compared to the rockets they’re usually compared to (Proton, Falcon 9, Ariane 5) because:

  1. PSLV is low-lift, the three foreign rockets are medium- to -heavy-lift; in fact, each of them can lift at least 1,000 kg more to the GTO than the GSLV Mk-III will be able to
  2. PSLV is cheaper to launch (and probably the Mk-III too) but this is only in terms of the rocket’s cost. The price of launching a kilogram on the rocket is thought to be higher
  3. PSLV and GSLV were both conceived in the 1970s and 1980s to meet India’s demands; they were never built to compete internationally like the Falcon 9 or the Ariane 5
  4. ISRO’s biggest source of income is the Indian government; Arianespace and SpaceX depend on the market and launch contracts from the EU and the US

While spelling out any of these points, never was I thinking that ISRO was inferior to the rest. My goal was to describe a different kind of pride, one that didn’t rest on comparisons but drew its significance from the idea that it was self-fulfilling. This is something I’ve tried to do before as well, for example with one of the ASTROSAT instruments as well as with ASTROSAT itself.

In fact, when discussing #3, it became quite apparent to me (thanks to the books I was quoting from) that comparing PSLV/GSLV with foreign rockets was almost fallacious. The PSLV was born out of a proposal Vikram Sarabhai drew up, before he died in 1970, to launch satellites into polar Sun-synchronous orbits – a need that became acute when ISRO began to develop its first remote-sensing satellites. The GSLV was born when ISRO realised the importance of its multipurpose INSAT satellites and the need to have a homegrown launcher for them.

Twitter, however, disagreed – often vehemently. While there’s no point discussing what the trolls had to say, all of the feedback I received there, as well as on comments on The Wire, seemed intent ISRO would have to be competing with foreign players and that simply was the best. (We moderate comments on The Wire, but in this case, I’m inclined to disapprove even the politely phrased ones because they’re just missing the point.) And this is exactly what I was trying to dispel through my article, so either I haven’t done my job well or there’s no swaying some people as to what ISRO ought to be doing.

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We’re not the BPO of the space industry nor is there a higher or lower from where we’re standing. And we don’t get the job done at a lower cost than F9 or A5 because, hey, completely different launch scenarios.

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Again, the same mistake. Don’t compare! At this point, I began to wonder if people were simply taking one look at the headline and going “Yay/Ugh, another comparison”. And I’m also pretty sure that this isn’t a social/political-spectrum thing. Quite a few comments I received were from people I know are liberal, progressive, leftist, etc., and they all said what this person ↑ had to say.

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Compete? Grab market? What else? Colonise Mars? Send probes to Jupiter? Provide internet to Africa? Save the world?

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Now you’re comparing the engines of two different kinds of rockets. Dear tweeter: the PSLV uses alternating solid and liquid fuel motors; the Falcon 9 uses a semi-cryogenic engine (like the SCE-200 ISRO is trying to develop). Do you remember how many failures we’ve had of the cryogenic engine? It’s a complex device to build and operate, so you need to make concessions for it in its first few years of use.

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“If [make comparison] why you want comparison?” After I’ve made point by [said comparison]: “Let ISRO do its thing.” Well done.

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This tweet was from a friend – who I knew for a fact was also trying to establish that Indian and foreign launchers are incomparable in that they are not meant to be compared. But I think it’s also an example of how the narrative has become skewed, often expressed only in terms of a hierarchy of engineering capabilities and market share, and not in terms of self-fulfilment. And in many other situations, this might have been a simple fact to state. In the one we’re discussing, however, words have become awfully polarised, twisted. Now, it seems, “different” means “crap”, “good” means nothing and “record” means “good”.

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Comments like this, representative of a whole bunch of them I received all of last evening, seem tinged with an inferiority complex, that we once launched sounding rockets carried on bicycles and now we’re doing things you – YOU – ought to be jealous of. And if you aren’t, and if you disagree that C37 was a huge deal, off you go with the rocket the next time!

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The Times of India even had a cartoon to celebrate the C37 launch: it mocked the New York Times‘s attempt to mock ISRO when the Mars Orbiter Mission injected itself into an orbit around the red planet on September 27, 2014. The NYT cartoon had, in the first place, been a cheap shot; now, TOI is just saying cheap shots are a legitimate way of expressing something. It never was. Moreover, the cartoons also made a mess of what it means to be elite – and disrupted conversations about whether there ought to be such a designation at all.

As for comments on The Wire:

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Obviously this is going to get the cut.

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As it happens, this one is going to get the cut, too.

I do think the media shares a large chunk of the blame when it comes to how ISRO is perceived. News portals, newspapers, TV channels, etc., have all fed the ISRO hype over the years: here, after all, was a PSU that was performing well, so let’s give it a leg up. In the process, the room for criticising ISRO shrank and has almost completely disappeared today. The organisation has morphed into a beacon of excellence that can do no wrong, attracting jingo-moths to fawn upon its light.

We spared it the criticisms (offered with civility, that is) that would have shaped the people’s perception of the many aspects of a space programme: political, social, cultural, etc. At the same time, it is also an organisation that hasn’t bothered with public outreach much and this works backwards. Media commentaries seem to bounce off its stony edifice with no effect. In all, it’s an interesting space in which to be engaged, as a researcher or even as an enthusiast, but I will say I did like it better when the trolls were not interested in what ISRO was up to.

Featured image credit: dlr_de/Flickr, CC BY 2.0.

SpaceX rocket blows up but let’s remember that #SpaceIsHard

The Wire
June 30, 2015

“… it’s not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.” Elon Musk said this in a now-famous interview to Wired in 2008 when questioned about what the future of private spaceflight looked like after SpaceX had failed three times in a row trying to launch its Falcon 1 rocket. At the close, Musk, the company’s founder and CEO, asserted, “As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”

Fast forward to June 28, 2015, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, 1950 IST. There’s a nebulaic cloud of white-grey smoke hanging in the sky, the signature of a Falcon 9 rocket that disintegrated minutes after takeoff. @SpaceX’s Twitter feed is MIA while other handles are bustling with activity. News trickles in that an “overpressurization” event occurred in the rocket’s second stage, a liquid-oxygen fueled motor. A tang of resolve hangs in conversations about the mishap – a steely reminder that #SpaceIsHard.

In October 2014, an Antares rocket exploded moments after lifting off, crashing down to leave the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, unusable for months. In April 2015, a Progress 59 cargo module launched by the Russian space agency’s Soyuz 2-1A rocket spun wildly out of control and fell back toward Earth – rather was incinerated in the atmosphere.

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All three missions – Orbital’s, Roscosmos’s and SpaceX’s – were resupply missions to the International Space Station. All three missions together destroyed food and clothing for the ISS crew, propellants, 30 small satellites, spare parts for maintenance and repairs, a water filtration system and a docking port – at least. The result is that NASA’s six-month buffer of surplus resources on the ISS has now been cut back to four. The next resupply mission is Roscosmos’s next after its April accident, on July 3, followed by a Japanese mission in August.

But nobody is going to blame any of these agencies overmuch – rather, they shouldn’t. Although hundreds of rockets are successfully launched every year, what’s invisible on TV is the miracle of millions of engineering-hours and tens of thousands of components coming together in each seamless launch. And like Musk said back in 2008, it’s not all-or-nothing each time people try to launch a rocket. Accidents will happen because of the tremendous complexity.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch was the third attempt in six months to reuse the rocket’s first-stage. It’s an ingenious idea: to have the first-stage robotically manoeuvre itself onto a barge, floated off Wallops Island, after performing its duties. Had the attempt succeeded, SpaceX would’ve created history. Being able to reuse such an important part of the rocket reduces launch costs – possible by a factor of hundred, Musk has claimed.

Broad outlay of how SpaceX's attempt to recover Falcon's first-stage will work. Credit: SpaceX
Broad outlay of how SpaceX’s attempt to recover Falcon’s first-stage will work. Credit: SpaceX

In September 2013, the first stage changed direction, reentered Earth’s atmosphere and made a controlled descent – but landed too hard in the water. A second attempt in April 2014 played out a similar narrative, with the stage getting broken up in hard seas. Then, in January 2015, an attempt to land the stage on the barge – called the autonomous spaceport drone ship – was partially successful. The stage guided itself toward the barge in an upright position but eventually came down too hard. Finally, on June 28, a yet-unknown glitch blew up the whole rocket 2.5 minutes after launch.

The Falcon 9’s ultimate goal is to ferry astronauts into space. After retiring its Space Shuttle fleet in 2011, NASA had no vehicles to send American astronauts into space from American soil, and currently coughs up $70 million to Roscosmos for each seat. As remedy, it awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to build human-rated rockets fulfilling the associated and stringent criteria in September 2014. The vehicles have until 2017 to be ready. So in a way, it’s good that these accidents are happening now while the missions are uncrewed (and the ISS is under no real threat of running out of supplies).

June 28 was also Musk’s 44th birthday. On behalf of humankind, and in thanks to his ambitions and perseverance, someone buy the man a drink.

After less than 100 days, Curiosity renews interest in Martian methane

A version of this story, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu on November 15, 2012.

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In the last week of October, the Mars rover Curiosity announced that there was no methane on Mars. The rover’s conclusion is only a preliminary verdict, although it is already controversial because of the implications of the gas’s discovery (or non-discovery).

The presence of methane is one of the most important prerequisites for life to have existed in the planet’s past. The interest in the notion was increased when Curiosity found signs that water may have flowed in the past through Gale Crater, the immediate neighbourhood of its landing spot, after finding sedimentary settlements.

The rover’s Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS), which analysed a small sample of Martian air to come to the conclusion, had actually detected a few parts per billion of methane. However, recognising that the reading was too low to be significant, it sounded a “No”.

In an email to this Correspondent, Adam Stevens, a member of the science team of the NOMAD instrument on the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter due to be launched in January 2016, stressed: “No orbital or ground-based detections have ever suggested atmospheric levels anywhere above 10-30 parts per billion, so we are not expecting to see anything above this level.”

At the same time, he also noted that the 10-30 parts per billion (ppb) is not a global average. The previous detections of methane found the gas localised in the Tharsis volcanic plateau, the Syrtis Major volcano, and the polar caps, locations the rover is not going to visit. What continues to keep the scientists hopeful is that methane on Mars seems to get replenished by some geochemical or biological source.

The TLS will also have an important role to play in the future. At some point, the instrument will go into a higher sensitivity-operating mode and make measurements of higher significance by reducing errors.

It is pertinent to note that scientists still have an incomplete understanding of Mars’s natural history. As Mr. Stevens noted, “While not finding methane would not rule out extinct or extant life, finding it would not necessarily imply that life exists or existed.”

Apart from methane, there are very few “bulk” signatures of life that the Martian geography and atmosphere have to offer. Scientists are looking for small fossils, complex carbon compounds and other hydrocarbon gases, amino acids, and specific minerals that could be suggestive of biological processes.

While Curiosity has some fixed long-term objectives, they are constantly adapted according to what the rover finds. Commenting on its plans, Mr. Stevens said, “Curiosity will definitely move up Aeolis Mons, the mountain in the middle of Gale Crater, taking samples and analyses as it goes.”

Curiosity is not the last chance to look more closely for methane in the near future, however.

On the other side of the Atlantic, development of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO), with which Mr. Stevens is working, is underway. A collaboration between the European Space Agency and the Russian Federal Space Agency, the TGO is planned to deploy a stationary Lander that will map the sources of methane and other gases on Mars.

Its observations will contribute to selecting a landing site for the ExoMars rover due to be launched in 2018.

Even as Curiosity completed 100 days on Mars on November 14, it still has 590 days to go. However, it has also already attracted attention from diverse fields of study. There is no doubt that from the short trip from the rim of Gale Crater, where it is now, to the peak of Aeolis Mons, Curiosity will definitely change our understanding of the enigmatic red planet.