This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows Mars in 2005. Indian space scientists plan to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2013 to look for evidence of life, a news report said.(AFP/NASA/ESA-HO/File)
Posted on 11/26/2006 1:18:35 PM PST by NormsRevenge
NEW DELHI (AFP) - Indian space scientists plan to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2013 to look for evidence of life, a news report said.
The six-to-eight-month mission, likely to be launched in the next seven years, would cost three billion rupees (67 million dollars), the Hindustan Times reported.
"Mars is emerging on our horizon. The geo-stationary launch vehicle can take a payload to Mars and our Deep Space Network can track it all the way," G. Madhavan Nair, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told the newspaper.
"There is a lot of interest in Mars. The missions of the United States and the European Space Agency have given us some interesting data. Let us see what value addition our mission can bring," he said.
The mission will study the chemical attributes of the Martian atmosphere and the planet's sub-soil and terrain, ISRO programme director S.C Chakravarthy told the English-language daily.
India plans to send its first unmanned probe to the moon in two or three years' time.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows Mars in 2005. Indian space scientists plan to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2013 to look for evidence of life, a news report said.(AFP/NASA/ESA-HO/File)
Someone needs to sell lottery tickets up there.
'OutSource 1' has cleared the launch pad..
well, figuratively anyway.
India isn't even in the top 100 nations, ranked by GDP per capita. This vanity mission is a totally twisted use of a poor nation's scant resources.
Once the next generation of call centers are set up over there, it will pay for itself.
NASA launches ships to Mars nearly every year now. Nothing to the moon, though, even if the moon is trivially easy anymore. BTW, looked for Mars this morning, but it wasn't visibly obvious even if it was on our horizon.
It's all a matter of priorities, and who benefits.
No nation's space programme has benefitted it's masses in the spread of education,healthcare & resource detection/development as India's has over the past 3 decades.....
There's no reason a country with a billion people can't be prosperous. My kids will live to see a Chinese middle class. It's free markets that govern prosperity, not size of population. I'm all for scientific research and such, but the sight of a nation famous for asphyxiating bureaucracy engaging in such a vanity project while it endures massive poverty rubs me the wrong way.
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