Tag: Vikram lander

Landing Day

Good luck, Chandrayaan 3. Good luck also to all the journalists covering this event from within India – a unique location because it’s where you will feel the most excitement today about the mission’s activities on the moon as well as the most difficult path to accessing bona fide information about them (thanks to the misinformation, sensationalism, and ISRO’s and the Indian government’s tendency to stop sharing information rather than more of it when something goes awry). So, I hope your memories serve you well and every detail that you recall is completely factual.

India is also a unique location because it’s going to the moon today. I’ve always felt somewhat uncomfortable with the idea that humans have gone to the moon. Whether you’re human or an alien to whom human geopolitics is trivial in the scheme of things, humans never went to the moon. People did. And people are divided along very many lines. Cooperation has come and gone, to the extent that there’s still considerable value for some country to have successfully executed its own moon-landing mission (robotic or otherwise). This is a bit of a tragedy given we’re all in this together and all that, but at the same time it would be naïve to believe otherwise.

And today, India will be taking its best shot at having a robotic lander autonomously soft-land on the lunar surface. I encourage you to follow the landing sequence on DD National (on TV), on YouTube livestreams of ISRO or the Press Information Bureau, or on a live blog on The Hindu (with real-time updates and analysis). Two hours before the lander’s powered descent – the label for the landing – is set to begin at 5.45 pm, ISRO will check whether all conditions are favourable to go ahead. If they are, the livestream will begin at 5.20 pm and the descent is expected to last around 19 minutes. If you’re new to all this, please check out The Hindu today for a full-page graphic on what to expect.

The shadows of Chandrayaan 2

When in September 2019 the surface component of the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, with the ‘Vikram’ lander crashing on the moon’s surface instead of gently touching down, there was a sense in all public spaces and conversations that the nation as a whole was in some grief. Until Wednesday, I couldn’t remember the excitement, anticipation, and anxiety that prevailed as the craft got closer to the moon, into its designated orbit, and began its descent. Wednesday was the start of the week before the second landing attempt, by the Chandrayaan 3 mission, and it all came screaming back.

Much of the excitement, anticipation, and anxiety that I’m feeling now as well is gratifying for the most part because it’s shared, that we’re doing this together. I cherish that because it’s otherwise very difficult to find with ISRO’s activities: all except the most superficial details of its most glamorous missions are often tucked away in some obscure corners of the web, it doesn’t have a functional public outreach unit, and there’s a lot of (unhelpful) uncertainty about the use of ISRO-made media.

But beyond facilitating this sense of togetherness, I’m concerned about ISRO’s sense of whether it should open itself up is now influenced by the public response to the Chandrayaan 2 mission, based on a parallel with India’s unfortunate tryst with solar cookers. In the early 1950s, the National Physical Laboratory fabricated a solar cooker with which the Indian government hoped to “transform household energy consumption … in a period of great uncertainty in food security and energy self-sufficiency,” in the words in The Hindu of science historian Shankar Nair. He continued:

The solar cooker was met with international press coverage and newsreels in the cinema. But the ‘indigenous’ device, based on a 19th century innovation, was dead in the water. Apart from its prohibitive price, it cooked very slowly. … The debacle caused the NPL to steer clear of populist ‘applied science’ for the remainder of K.S. Krishnan’s directorship.

Author Arun Mohan Sukumar recounted the same story but with more flair at the launch event of his book in Bangalore in March 2020:

A CSIR scientist said the failure of the solar cooker project basically ensured that all the scientists [who worked on it] retreated into the comfort of their labs and put them off “applied science”.

Here’s a project commenced almost immediately after independence meant to create technology by Indians for Indians, and after it failed for various reasons, the political spotlight that had been put on the project was counterproductive. Nehru himself investing this kind of capital exposed him and the scientific establishment to criticism that they were perhaps not used to. These were venerated men in their respective fields and they were perhaps unused to being accountable in this visceral way. …

This is the kind of criticism confronted by the scientific establishment and it is a consequence of politics. I agree with Prof [Jahnavi] Phalkey when she says it was a consequence of the political establishment not insulating the scientific establishment from the sort of criticism which may or may not be informed but you know how the press is. That led to a gradual breaking of ranks between the CSIR and the political vision for India…

The reflections of the solar-cooker debacle must be obvious in the events that followed the events of September 7, 2019. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had spoken of the Chandrayaan 2 mission on multiple occasions ahead of the landing attempt (including from the Red Fort on Independence Day). That the topmost political leader of a country takes so much interest in a spacefaring mission is a good thing but his politics has also been communal and majoritarian, and to have the mission invoked in conversations tinged with nationalistic fervour always induced nervousness.

Modi was also present in the control room as ‘Vikram’ began its descent over the lunar surface and, after news of the crash emerged, was seen hugging a visibly distraught K. Sivan, then the ISRO chairman – the same sort of hug that Modi had become famous for imposing on the leaders of other countries at multilateral fora. Modi’s governance has been marked by a fixation on symbols, and the symbols that he’d associated with Chandrayaan 2 made it clear that the mission was technological but also political. Its success was going to be his success. (Sample this.)

Sure enough, there was a considerable amount of post-crash chatter on social media platforms, on TV news channels, and on some news websites that tried to spin the mission as a tremendous success not worthy of any criticism that the ‘left’ and the ‘liberals’ were allegedly slinging at ISRO. But asking whether this is a “left v. right” thing would miss the point. If the sources of these talking points had exercised any restraint and waited for the failure committee report, I’m sure we could all have reached largely the same conclusion: that Chandrayaan 2 got ABC right and XYZ not so right, that it would have to do PQR for Chandrayaan 3, and that we can all agree that space is hard.

Irrespective of what the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ alleged, Chandrayaan 2 becoming the battleground on which these tensions manifested would surely have frayed ISRO scientists. To adapt Sukumar’s words to this context, the more cantankerous political crowd investing this kind of interest exposed ISRO to criticism that it was perhaps not used to. These were venerated men in their respective fields and they were perhaps unused to being accountable in this visceral way. This is the kind of criticism confronted by the scientific establishment and it is a consequence of politics…

The response to NPL’s solar cookers put scientists off “applied science”. Can we hope that the response to Chandrayaan 2 wouldn’t have put ISRO scientists off public engagement after Chandrayaan 3 ends, whether in (some kind of) failure or success? There are those of us beyond the din who know that the mission is very hard, and why, but at the same time it’s not like ISRO has always acted in good faith or with the public interest in mind. For example, it hasn’t released Chandrayaan 2’s failure committee report to date. So exercising the option of waiting for this report before making our minds up would have taken us nowhere.

(On the other hand, the officially determined causes of failure of the GSLV F10 mission – an almost apolitical affair – were more readily available.)

I’m also concerned whether ISRO itself can still construe respectful criticism of its work as such or will perceive it to be ideologically motivated vitriol. A characteristic feature of institutions overtaken by the nationalist programme is that they completely villify all criticism, even when it is merited. S. Somanath, ISRO’s current chairman, recently signalled that he might have been roped into this programme when he extolled “Vedic science”. If ISRO lets its response to failures be guided by politicians and bureaucrats, then we could also expect ISRO’s response to resemble that of the political class as well.

As always, time will tell, but I sincerely hope that it tells of one outcome instead of another.

Featured image: A view of the Chandrayaan 2 lander and rover seen undergoing tests, June 27, 2019. Credit: ISRO, dithered by ditherit.com.

A request to ISRO about Chandrayaan 3

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said its launch window for the Chandrayaan 3 mission is July 12-19. For now, the mission is expected to lift off on July 14 (at 2.35 pm IST). Chandrayaan 3’s mission is the same as that of its predecessor, Chandrayaan 2, with some marginal additions.

It has the same hardware configuration, including a lander named ‘Vikram’ containing a rover named ‘Pragyan’, attached to a propulsion module. The surface lunar mission has a planned lifetime of 14 days. The lander has four scientific payloads and the rover, two. The propulsion module itself has one. The biggest difference between the two missions, it would seem, are changes to reduce the chances of another crash-landing. As Jatan Mehta wrote in his ‘Moon Monday’ newsletter:

To increase the chances of sticking the landing this time around, ISRO has made several upgrades to the Chandrayaan-2-like lander, such as software improvements to accommodate failure, strengthened legs, a couple of new sensors for enhanced and redundant navigation-related measurements, and better power and communication systems.

Chandrayaan 3’s success will strengthen India’s position within the Artemis Accords, which it signed just last month, because it will make the country one of only four to have landed and operated a rover on the Moon. But as much as ISRO has a good reason to aim for success, it may have an opportunity if the mission fails as well – an opportunity to show that it has matured as an organisation.

The Chandrayaan 2 mission experienced a partial, but significant, failure on September 7, 2019, when its lander, bearing the rover, crashed on the lunar surface instead of gently touching down. ISRO researchers later traced the problem to a glitch in the onboard computer that lowered the amount by which the lander had to decelerate as it descended and an issue in the propulsion system. But a few months passed between the crash and the crash report, and in this time, the public conversation surrounding the accident was a cesspool of hyper-nationalist narratives and counterproductive statements by senior ISRO members.

As soon as news of the lander’s crash became public, ISRO stopped communicating updates, and refused to admit – despite all the evidence pointing that way – it had happened for a full week. In keeping with the national BJP government’s mission until then to make the Indian space programme a matter of national pride by couching its feats in a nationalist narrative, social media platforms were inundated with claims from the usual corners that the part of the mission that had failed was a “technology demonstrator” that made up a minor part of Chandrayaan 2.

Around this time, then ISRO chief K. Sivan also told journalists that the Chandrayaan 2 mission was a “98% success” – a stunningly disingenuous attempt to downplay what had been, until the mission’s launch, the basis of many of ISRO’s claims to greatness as well as which had occupied hundreds of scientists and engineers for several years. Technology demonstrators are important, but ‘Vikram’ and ‘Pragyan’ weren’t just that; more importantly, no way they were just 2% of the mission. Yet Sivan had been the one to say such a thing, even if he later palmed the blame off to a review committee, even as the organisation he helmed made Herculean efforts to reestablish contact with ‘Vikram’. All of this vitiated the narrative of the incident.

To make matters worse, after the lander’s crash on the day, journalists gathered at the ISRO HQ in Bengaluru were treated to a scene as Pallava Bagla shouted demanding Sivan address them. When ISRO members other than Sivan did turn up, he was rude. Bagla later apologised for his behaviour – but not before a senior Congress leader, Abhishek Singhvi, called Bagla “insane” and asked for him to be sacked. It seemed for a time that no one was interested in letting the dust settle.

For those who were plainly curious about the mission’s technical specifics as they existed, the specifics in which ISRO’s lessons for future missions, including Chandrayaan 3, would take root, the sole resource (in my limited experience) was the ISRO forum on Reddit, where independent spaceflight enthusiasts were putting together and combing through photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to find the lander’s resting place and clues to the cause of the accident.

The Indian government has a penchant for cutting access to information after major accidents and disasters. It did so after the Joshimath landslip, when ISRO reported that the town had slid by 5.4 cm in 12 days. It did so after it supposedly liberated Jammu and Kashmir by abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution. It did so after the Manipur riots and is yet to restore connections in the state, going so far as to brook long-winded arguments about access to VPNs in the process.

Even before Chandrayaan 2, there were some signs that ISRO had become part of the fold, including – but not limited to – the BJP government’s narratives of ISRO’s feats, the organisation’s increasing opacity, and pettiness in the face of criticism. In 2018, its then chief Sivan said that ISRO would like to lead international efforts to mine helium-3 on the Moon and transport it to the earth, disregarding the unhelpful hype and pseudoscience surrounding the isotope’s potential as a nuclear fuel.

More recently, Sivan’s successor and current chief S. Somanath claimed that India has had a “knowledge society” since “Vedic times”, that Indians’ accomplishments were appropriated by Western scholars who then regurgitated it as their own findings, and that “those working in the fields of artificial intelligence [and] machine learning love Sanskrit”.

These signs aren’t encouraging, but it’s possible to hope that these individuals and their advisors will put ISRO above themselves and their opinions. I sincerely wish that Chandrayaan 3 succeeds to the tune of 100%. At the same time, space is hard, as they say (especially for less-well-funded and less-well-technologically supplied organisations like ISRO).

And in the event of a failure, I hope ISRO will respond by sharing regular and timely updates, answer journalists’ queries, think before speaking, and, overall, conduct itself with the grace of being the premier space-faring body of the Global South.

Note: This article was updated at 5.10 pm on July 7, 2023, to include an issue with the propulsion system among the reasons Chandrayaan 2’s surface mission failed. Featured image: The LVM 3 launch vehicle lifts off bearing Chandrayaan 2 from Sriharikota, July 22, 2019. Credit: ISRO.

The virtues and vices of reestablishing contact with Vikram

There was a PTI report yesterday that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is still trying to reestablish contact with the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan 2 mission. The lander had crashed onto the lunar surface on September 7 instead of touching down. The incident severed its communications link with ISRO ground control, leaving the org. unsure about the lander’s fate although all signs pointed to it being kaput.

Subsequent attempts to photograph the designated landing site using the Chandrayaan 2 orbiter as well as the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter didn’t provide any meaningful clues about what could’ve happened except that the crash-landing could’ve smashed Vikram to pieces too small to be observable from orbit.

When reporting on ISRO or following the news about developments related to it, the outside-in view is everything. It’s sort of like a mapping between two sets. If the first set represents the relative significance of various projects within ISRO and the second the significance as perceived by the public according to what shows up in the news, then Chandrayaan 2, human spaceflight and maybe the impending launch of the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle are going to look like moderately sized objects in set 1 but really big in set 2.

The popular impression of what ISRO is working on is skewed towards projects that have received greater media coverage. This is a pithy truism but it’s important to acknowledge because ISRO’s own public outreach is practically nonexistent, so there are no ‘normalising’ forces working to correct the skew.

This is why it seems like a problem when ISRO – after spending over a week refusing to admit that the Chandrayaan 2 mission’s surface component had failed and its chairman K. Sivan echoing an internal review’s claim that the mission had in fact succeeded to the extent of 98% – says it’s still trying to reestablish contact without properly describing what that means.

It’s all you hear about vis-à-vis the Indian space programme in the news these days, if not about astronaut training or that the ‘mini-PSLV’ had a customer even before it had a test flight, potentially contribute to the unfortunate impression that these are ISRO’s priorities at the moment when in fact the relative significance of these missions – i.e. their size within set 1 – is arranged differently.

For example, the idea of trying to reestablish contact with the Vikram lander has been featured in at least three news reports in the last week, subsequently amplified through republishing and syndication, whereas the act of reestablishing contact could be as simple as one person pointing an antenna in the general direction of the Vikram lander, blasting a loud ‘what’s up’ message in the radio frequency and listening intently for a ‘not much’ reply. On the other hand, there’s a bunch of R&D, manufacturing practices and space-science discussions ISRO’s currently working on but which receive little to no coverage in the mainstream press.

So when Sivan repeatedly states across many days that they’re still trying to reestablish contact with Vikram, or when he’s repeatedly asked the same question by journalists with no imagination about ISRO’s breadth and scope, it may not necessarily signal a reluctance to admit failure in the face of overwhelming evidence that the mission has in fact failed (e.g., apart from not being able to visually spot the lander, the lander’s batteries aren’t designed to survive the long and freezing lunar night, so it’s extremely unlikely that it has power to respond to the ‘what’s up’). It could just be that either Sivan, the journalists or both – but it’s unlikely to be the journalists unless they’re aware of the resources it takes to attempt to reestablish contact – are happy to keep reminding the people that ISRO’s going to try very, very hard before it can abandon the lander.

Such metronymic messaging is politically favourable as well to maintain the Chandrayaan 2 mission’s place in the nationalist techno-pantheon. But it should also be abundantly clear at this point that Sivan’s decision to position himself as the organisation’s sole point of contact for media professionals at the first hint of trouble, his organisation’s increasing opacity to public view, if not scrutiny, and many journalists’ inexplicable lack of curiosity about things to ask the chairman all feed one another, ultimately sidelining other branches of ISRO and the public interest itself.

The mission that was 110% successful

Caution: Satire.

On October 2, Kailash S., the chairman of the Indian Wonderful Research Organisation (IWRO), announced that the Moonyaan mission had become a 110% success. At an impromptu press conference organised inside the offices of India Day Before Yesterday, he said that the orbiter was performing exceptionally well and that a focus on its secondary scientific mission could only diminish the technological achievement that it represented.

Shortly after the lander, carrying a rover plus other scientific instruments, crashed on the Moon’s surface two weeks ago, Kailash had called the mission a “90-95% success”. One day after it became clear Moonyaan’s surface mission had ended for good and well after IWRO had added that the orbiter was on track to be operational for over five years, Kailash revised his assessment to 98%.

On the occasion of Gandhi Jayanti, Kailash upgraded his score because despite the lander’s failure to touchdown, it had been able to descend from an altitude of 120 km to 2.1 km before a supposed thruster anomaly caused it to plummet instead of brake. “We have been analysing the mission in different ways and we have found that including this partially successful descent in our calculations provides a more accurate picture of Moonyaan’s achievement,” Kailash said to journalists.

When a member of a foreign publication prodded him saying that space doesn’t exactly reward nearness, Kailash replied, “I dedicate this mission to the Swachh Bharat mission, which has successfully ended open defecation in India today.” At this moment, Prime Minister A. Modern Nadir, who was sitting in front of him, turned around and hugged Kailash.

When another journalist, from BopIndia, had a follow-up question about whether the scientific mission of Moonyaan was relevant at all, Kailash responded that given the givens, the payloads onboard the orbiter had a responsibility to “work properly” or “otherwise they could harm the mission’s success and bring its success rate down to the anti-national neighbourhood of 100%”.

On all three occasions – September 7, September 22 and October 2 – India became the first country in the world as well as in history to achieve the success rates that it did in such a short span of time, in the context of a lunar mission. Thus, mission operators have their fingers crossed that the instruments won’t embarrass what has thus far been a historical technological performance with a corresponding scientific performance with returns of less than 110%.

Finally, while Moonyaan has elevated his profile, Kailash revealed his plan to take it even higher when he said the Heavenyaan mission would be good to go in the next 30 months. Heavenyaan is set to be India’s first human spaceflight programme and will aim to launch three astronauts to low-Earth orbit, have them spend a few days there, conducting small experiments, and return safely to Earth in a crew capsule first tested in 2014.

IWRO has already said it will test semi-cryogenic engines – to increase the payload capacity of its largest rocket so it can launch the crew capsule into space – it purchased from an eastern European nation this year. Considering all other components are nearly ready, including the astronauts who have managed with the nation’s help to become fully functioning adults, Heavenyaan is already 75% successful. Only 35% remains, Kailash said.

In financial terms, Heavenyaan is more than 10-times bigger than Moonyaan. Considering there has been some speculation that the latter’s lander couldn’t complete its descent because mission operators hadn’t undertaken sufficiently elaborate tests on Earth that could have anticipated the problem, observers have raised concerns about whether IWRO will skip tests and cut corners for Heavenyaan as well as for future interplanetary missions.

When alerted to these misgivings, Nadir snatched the mic and said, “What is testing? I will tell you. Testing is ‘T.E.S.T.’. ‘T’ stands for ‘thorough’. ‘E’ for ‘effort’. ‘S’ for ‘sans’. ‘T’ for ‘testing’. So what is ‘test’? It is ‘thorough effort sans testing’. It means that when you are building the satellite, you do it to the best of your ability without thinking about the results. Whatever will happen will happen. This is from the Bhagavad Gita. When you build your satellite to the best of your ability, why should you waste money on testing? We don’t have to spend money like NASA.”

Nadir’s quip was met with cheers in the hall. At this point, the presser concluded and the journalists were sent away to have tea and pakodas*.

*Idea for pakodas courtesy @pradx.

The fight over ISRO

My report about ISRO’s ’90-95%’ success claim vis-à-vis Chandrayaan 2 had precisely three kinds of response, split 49%, 49% and 2%.

One 49% group went like this:

The other 49% went like this:

The remainder, which constituted meaningful engagement, was virtually residual.

To add to this, K. Sivan has brought a new thing about him in his position as ISRO chairman, which is to issue loose statements where his predecessors have been a lot more careful and considered. In 2018, he said ISRO would look for He-3 on the Moon – a claim that has since been thoroughly debunked. Last weekend, he said Chandrayaan 2 was a 95% success, which was eminently debunkable.

Makes one wonder if what one is doing is useful at all – but before this thought process hand-holds one down into a pit of self-deprecation, various temptations take over: confounding factors (that there could be a lot of people out there who appreciate your work but don’t tell you about it), trolls and their tendencies (such as compulsive, knee-jerk responses to tweets from a particular account), even doubts about what people use Twitter for (meaningful engagement v. mobilising political forces to affect outcomes offline).

That said, the popular rhetoric swirling around Chandrayaan 2 indicates that ISRO has finally been subsumed by the jingoists’ circus – where addled onlookers gather either to applaud or deride launches, trans-orbital manoeuvres and interplanetary journeys and, at the crack of imaginary whips, descend into a brawl over who can be a greater moron for love of the country. One can only hope, after being shoved to the back as a metaphorical wuss, that this rot hasn’t taken root within the organisation itself.

The PM’s Chandrayaan group-hug

I understand Dutt’s interpretation of the moment in question but with reservations about what it signals for the nation’s many oppressed. For starters, how many people actually gave a damn?

A few hundred people – many of them mainstream journalists – have been saying that over a billion people did, or should. But even if you are a stickler for arithmetic correctness, it is hard to believe that this claim is true when, for example, The Wire just received a report headline ‘In Kashmir, communication gag ‘robs’ people of the right to mourn their dead’.

This is an entire state that has been labouring from inside a communications blackout for the last month, and the undermining of whose people’s democratic rights was met with less anger than news of Prime Minister Modi’s hug has been received with sheepish joy.

To be sure, my contention is not with whether Modi was being nice when he hugged K. Sivan but entirely with assuming the softness of the gesture extends to hundreds of thousands of people around the country who remain unable to speak up for themselves, or be heard when they do, because of Modi’s actions. If not Kashmir, there is also Assam.

I cannot, will not claim to know what these people really want, and certainly not that their spirits ought to be elevated by a hug from the Man.

Moon, mission and Modi

Should Prime Minister Narendra Modi not have been in the control room during the autonomous descent phase of Chandrayaan 2? Did his presence exert unnecessary pressure on the ISRO scientists?

I don’t know if the pressure was unnecessary. Irrespective of who was present where, a decade-long, Rs-1,000-crore effort is going to be high-pressure when it hinges on one threading-the-needle level manoeuvre. During major space missions like this, I think K. Sivan or similarly senior agency officials need to get used to the presence of senior political leaders in the control room.

Such a thing might not happen in other parts of the world but, to adapt the ideas in Mukund Thattai’s essay about whether there’s an Indian way of doing science, there’s certainly such a thing as an Indian way of doing space and it involves politicians in the control room.

Of course, I’m being careful to steer clear of any wishful thinking. I could have said for example that the prime minister should ideally have closely followed the mission but not from within the control room. However, Modi’s style of functioning has included attempts to steal the limelight on important occasions and one of the very few fortunate effects of this is that his deep interest in the space programme should increase ISRO’s likelihood of receiving more money and support for future missions. Whether such interest will morph into interference is a separate story.

In fact, I was heartened by Modi’s words at the end of the mission (assuming he meant them sincerely). I like to use the analogy of the Mission Mangal film: if it weren’t for Modi’s successful campaign to make nationalism profitable, the film wouldn’t have got made. Similarly, it would be wishful thinking to expect Modi to get involved but on any terms except his own.