Why the death of India’s groundbreaking Mars orbiter is a big deal

On September 24, 2014, the Indian Space Research Organization made history. A year earlier, the nation’s leading space agency had launched a small spacecraft toward Mars, hoping to nudge the boxy probe into the red planet’s orbit and have it float alongside NASA’s state-of-the-art Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s inventive Mars Express allow.

That was an ambitious goal at the time.

India had yet to get into the interplanetary game, committing just $74 million (rupees 4.5 billion) to match what the US once matched by nearly 10 times. Even Christopher Nolan budgeted a lot more to produce his glorious, spacey film Interstellar, and Boeing’s cheapest airliner costs a few million more.

Then came September 24, 2014.

ISRO’s spacecraft, known as Mangalyaan, officially entered orbit on Mars as part of the Mars Orbiter mission, making India the fourth nation to introduce a robot into Mars’ gravitational vortex – and the first to do so in their first try did. But as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end.

This week India inevitably said goodbye to Mangalyaan, which in Hindi means ‘Vehicle of Mars’.

After eight incredible years of service studying the rocky world’s atmosphere and testing key technologies from the air — a much longer lifespan than the agency anticipated — Mangalyaan ran out of fuel and battery power.

Scientists believe the culprit may have been in part an unfortunate sequence of solar eclipses. Mangalyaan is solar powered and therefore could not be recharged without the power of the sun. From now on it will drift slowly and silently towards the surface of Mars.

“The spacecraft is unrecoverable and has reached its end of life,” ISRO said in a statement Monday, stressing that “the mission will always be considered a remarkable technological and scientific achievement in the history of planetary exploration.”

Mangalyaan’s Legacy

ISRO’s Mars space explorer was a soldier.

When Mangalyaan lifted off from Earth almost a decade ago, the spacecraft team expected to say goodbye to their muse in about six months. However, as ISRO states: “Although the Mars Orbiter Mission was designed to have a lifespan of six months as a technology demonstrator, it has lived in Mars orbit for about eight years and has achieved a number of significant scientific results.”

Not only did Mangalyaan help scientists understand elusive features of Mars like the planet’s towering dust storms and create a detailed atlas of its icy poles, but eventually the spacecraft’s lens transcended the vicinity of Mars to bring light to other parts of our planet as well to throw solar system.

Mangalyaan, ISRO points out in a sort of obituary, managed to unlock mysteries about our Sun’s corona before losing contact with ground control. And during a national meeting held last week to discuss the mission’s finale, the team also recalled the more human implications of Mangalyaan’s legacy.

So far, according to the agency, more than 7,200 users have registered to download Mangalyaan’s data from ISRO’s online archive, 400 of them international, and about 27,000 downloads of various sizes have already been made.

“The mission has also contributed to the generation of human resources in the field of planetary science,” said ISRO. “It has produced several PhD students, while many of the research scientists are using the mission’s data to continue their PhD work.”

A rocky road into the rocky world

It’s poignant to reflect on Mangalyaan’s enduring influence on space exploration, because around the time the spacecraft left Earth, reporters, scientists, and space enthusiasts worldwide were predicting a variety of directions in which that influence might flex.

Most opinions were wide open.

BBC News openly called India’s Mars mission “cheap and exciting” because the country’s space program “succeeded on the first attempt where others failed” by sending an operational mission to Mars orbit. In terms of that low cost, ISRO managed to keep things “simple,” the publication explained, trying to get the best bang for the buck.

For example, Mangalyaan was equipped with methane detectors designed to answer some of the most pressing questions about the Martian atmosphere, such as whether methane-producing bugs exist anywhere on the planet, providing evidence of extraterrestrial life.

“The mission is also credited with the discovery of ‘suprathermal’ argon-40 atoms in the Martian exosphere, which hinted at one of the possible mechanisms for the atmosphere escaping Mars,” ISRO said.

Some opinions were well intentioned but missed the mark.

In 2014, a New York Times sketch of Mangalyaan erupted in controversy for teasing the fact that India would soon join the “elite space club.” Many found it distasteful because the character, representing India, wore a traditional dhoti and turban and held a cow on a leash while knocking on the door of a so-called “elite space club”. Inside, two white men looked puzzled. One was holding a newspaper with the headline “India’s Mars Mission.”

In a letter of apology, a Times editor said that “cartoonist Heng Kim Song’s intention is to emphasize that space exploration is no longer the exclusive domain of wealthy Western countries,” although Indian reporters still felt that the Graphics spoiled the mood.

On the other hand, ISRO met with a lot of criticism.

Some argue that Mangalyaan’s lack of scientific publications — after five years it had only produced about 27 — shows the agency was in a hurry to get the probe there quickly. In response, others claim that Mangalyaan was intended to be a six-month technology demonstration and happened to outlast its expected lifespan. Maybe even those 27 releases are a great achievement in this case.

In an attempt to compete with the interplanetary space missions of wealthier nations, some have also suggested that the agency spend money on space exploration that could be better spent on problems in the local area. Things like healthcare innovation, infrastructure development, and food insecurity solutions that space agencies like NASA or Roscosmos don’t have to consider because they’re based in privileged countries.

In counterargument, however, Indian journalist Samanth Subramanian wrote in The New Yorker in 2013 that “Mangalyaan’s $73 million budget is a pittance compared to the $20 billion India will spend this year to help two of them with subsidized food to feed all three of its citizens, or the $5.3 billion being spent on a rural employment plan this year.”

It is undoubtedly difficult to measure the benefits and costs – especially the economic ones – of a space mission. But now, at the end of it all, it would be remiss to rule out the eventual payoff that came from Mangalyaan’s success.

The existence of this spacecraft fueled job creation, the mission’s unique findings enriched the field of astronomy, and the project’s culmination sent a moving message.

The adventure into space does not have to be based solely on wealth, power or privilege, but also on the intrinsic human impulse to explore.