Shooting for the Stars

THE YEAR 2023 BROUGHT ENDLESS prestige to India as its space programme scaled new highs. It entered the elite space club of sorts after the Chandray­aan-3 mission made it the first coun­try to land a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole, also called the dark side of the moon. The feather on the cap was the shoestring budget with which India accomplished the feat, a characteristic of the country’s space missions, includ­ing the successful Mars Orbiter Mis­sion of 2013-2014, which is also called Mangalyaan. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had achieved another first back then: to have a space probe en­ter Mars orbit on its first attempt. Shortly after the success of this year’s moon mission, which was possible thanks to great ingenuity on the part of the country’s space scientists, Shashi Tharoor, author and lawmaker, summed up the very nature of local resourcefulness and glory of India’s space explorations, stat­ing that “Mangalyaan cost less than the film Gravity, and Chan­drayaan-3 less than Interstellar,” space mission movies directed by Alfonso Cuarón and Christopher Nolan, respectively.

It’s the triumph of Indian inventiveness over big spending. Do­ing more with less is key to our homegrown spirit of ‘jugaad innova­tion’, a concept that Simone Ahuja, a US-based Indian-origin author and entrepreneur highlighted in her book titled Jugaad Innovation: A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century. In an interview with this author in 2013, Ahuja explained that there is a lot of difference be­tween mere jugaad and jugaad innovation. “While the former may be symbolic of the perception about everything Indian—that sloppy, lazy way of doing things, which manifests itself in moving files and in building roads—the latter is about a Gujarati potter’s innovation: a fridge made exclusively using clay which stores 18 litres of water,” she said.

Chandrayaan-1, India’s first mission to the moon, proved to be a success in surveying the lunar surface. Chandrayaan-2, the second mission that included an orbiter, a lander and a rover, failed due to a software glitch. Binny TR, head of the Quality Control Division for Launch Vehicle Integration and Testing Operations at ISRO, tells Open how that ingenuity worked this time round in our moon mission. “Chandrayaan-3, with the lander [Vikram] and the rover [Pragyan] subsystems, made the planned soft landing on the south pole of the moon where no previous lunar mission objects from any country had gone. The Chandrayaan-3 made use of fully indigenous technology, though some scientific payloads in the lander were from global space agencies. The achievement of soft landing was sweeter, not­ing that the first attempt of soft landing—in Chandrayaan-2 in 2019—had failed at the last mile due to technical flaws and lack of proper validation testing and simulation trials on expected modes of failures or unforeseen situations during the mission.”

The 49-year-old goes on to explain how ISRO, under what he describes as the dynamic leadership of S Somanath, learnt to un­learn from the mistakes of 2019, again a brave instance of placing mindset over matter. They addressed each problem, one after the other, Binny says. “Under the techno-managerial leadership of Mr Somanath, the lessons of failure in Chandrayaan-2 were de­tailed out to micro levels and suitable modifications were done on the system elements for overcoming the failures,” he explains.

It wasn’t an easy effort. Binny asserts, “Towards this, addi­tional redundancies were built into the lander propulsion and control systems and the Mission Control and guidance software were subjected to the large number of simulations spread over months of the testing phase.” He further emphasises that “ad­ditional trials on the hardware were done on the simulated ground and gravity conditions to understand the behaviour and response of the control system elements and software.” It didn’t end there. Mission planning was also made foolproof with widened margins of locations identified for landing and similar other tasks. “Thus, the learning phase from lessons of failure in 2019 of Chandrayaan-2 took place over time and no pressure was put on target schedule dates. More priority was given to technical completion of desired tests,” he sums up.

Jugaad innovation is tougher than it appears.

As hard work paid rich dividends, another humbling aspect of the burnished showpiece of Indian space enterprise came to the fore: that the leaders were mostly from tier-2 or tier-3 engineering colleges who, notwithstanding their excellence, placed service to the nation above high-paying jobs elsewhere.

Even as cartoons appeared in the Western media mocking In­dia for focusing on space missions while many of its poor people struggled with extreme poverty, truth prevails that the advances in space explorations that India has attained—with a fraction of the costs that other countries had set aside for the purpose—go into helping with agriculture, monitoring disasters and weather patterns. According to the Government of India’s statements, ISRO’s programmes have played a significant role in the socio-economic development of India and have supported both civil­ian and military domains in various aspects, including disaster management, telemedicine, and navigation and reconnaissance missions. More importantly, ISRO’s spin-off technologies are used in the engineering and medical sectors. The technology spinoffs from the space programme have led to cost-effective develop­ments in healthcare—the ISRO website mentions innovations like artificial limbs, artificial jaw bones, left ventricular assist de­vices and ventilators as examples. It helps the poorest of poor ac­cess quality medical care, communicate well and upgrade them­selves. It has also contributed to developing safety equipment and gear that is ubiquitous across Indian homes, commercial spaces and even in the military, such as flame-proof coatings and aerogel thermal wear used by soldiers in extremely cold weather.

ISRO attributes the success of its moon mission to collabora­tive effort. An announcement on its website said, “As the atten­tion turns towards the approach and landing of Chandrayaan-3 [CH-3] on the moon, it is the right time to reflect on the making of CH-3. The spacecraft is the result of a collaborative effort, in­volving a vast array of experts from nearly all ISRO centres and contributions from external partners.” Explaining that space is an unforgiving environment, characterised by high vacuum and ionising radiation, it lists the many challenges ISRO has faced: “Due to the lack of possibilities for in-situ repairs, the develop­ment of space missions demands meticulous planning, design, testing, analysis, and review. It is a true example of rocket science that necessitates a multi-disciplinary team of domain experts working hand in hand with project execution teams, to tailor solutions for each specific mission.” According to the statement, the major ISRO centres/units involved in the design, develop­ment, testing and realisation of the CH-3 mission include the UR Rao Satellite Centre, Bengaluru; Vikram Sarabhai Space Cen­tre, Thiruvananthapuram; Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, Thiruvananthapuram and Bengaluru; ISRO Satellite Tracking Centre, Bengaluru; Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad; Laboratory for Electro-Optics Systems, Bengaluru; ISRO Inertial Systems Unit, Thiruvananthapuram; ISRO Propulsion Complex, Mahendragiri (Tamil Nadu); Satish Dhawan Space Centre, Sri­harikota (Andhra Pradesh); National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad; Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad; and Space Physics Laboratory, Thiruvananthapuram.

PRL was established in 1947. Later in 1962, the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) was set up. These entities became ISRO in 1969. As of now, India’s space programme is one of the most robust ones in the whole world, having under­taken missions to Mars and the moon, and made launch vehicles and satellites. Its space mission continues to be ambitious. On September 2, ISRO launched Aditya-L1, the first space-based Indi­an mission to study the sun, and is currently on its journey to the destination of sun-earth L1 point (L1). According to reports, the High Energy L1 Orbiting X-ray Spectrometer (HEL1OS) payload onboard the Aditya-L1 spacecraft has captured the first glimpse of solar flares. ISRO posted on X on December 8: “Aditya-L1 Mission: The SUIT payload captures full-disk images of the Sun in near-ultraviolet wavelengths. The images include the first-ever full-disk representations of the Sun in wavelengths ranging from 200 to 400 nm. They provide pioneering insights into the intricate details of the Sun’s photosphere and chromosphere.” SUIT or Solar Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope is one of the payloads on­board the Aditya-L1 mission.

ISRO says that among the notable features revealed from these pictures are sunspots and quiet sun regions. SUIT observations will help scientists study the dynamic coupling of the magnetised solar atmosphere and assist them in placing tight constraints on the effects of solar radiation on Earth’s climate, the agency adds. “The development of SUIT involved a collaborative effort under the leadership of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune. This collaboration included ISRO, the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), the Centre for Excellence in Space Science Indian (CESSI) at IISER-Kolkata, the Indian Institute of Astrophysics Bengaluru, the Udaipur Solar Observatory (USO-PRL), and Tezpur University Assam,” the agency said in a release.

TO BE SURE, India has since the beginning stressed on scien­tific temper devoted heavily to its space programme and other investments in science and technology despite criticism that the country’s rulers had better feed its poor and care for those grappling with diseases and lack of sanitation. The visionaries who set up the country’s premier scientific institutions knew well that technological advances alone could help bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots. That emphasis is evident in the passionate pursuit of enhancing the country’s technological prowess from the time of Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi, who after the triumph of the recent moon mission, explained that the landing on the dark side of the moon mirrored “the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians.” India now designs, makes and launches satellites, rockets and multiple interplanetary probes. Incidentally, ISRO and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), the pre­mier US space research agency, are set to launch their joint mission NISAR in the first quarter of 2024.

ISRO operates through a countrywide network of centres. Sen­sors and payloads are developed at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad. Satellites are designed, developed, assembled, and tested at the UR Rao Satellite Centre (formerly, the ISRO Satel­lite Centre) in Bengaluru. Launch vehicles are developed at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. Launch­es take place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota Island, near Chennai. The Master Control Facilities for geostation­ary satellite station keeping are located at Hassan (Karnataka) and Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh). Reception and processing facilities for remote-sensing data are at the National Remote Sensing Centre in Hyderabad. ISRO’s commercial arm is Antrix Corporation, which has its headquarters in Bengaluru.

Space research in India started in the 1920s with the likes of SK Mitra taking the initiative working on various initiatives in Kolkata. In the 1940s, the segment saw significant improvement under the leadership of Vikram Sarabhai, founder of PRL, and Homi Bhabha, who founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1945. In 1972, ISRO was brought under the Department of Space.

Notably, ISRO has benefited vastly by recruiting women en­gineers into its fold. According to the agency, over 100 women staff have played a direct significant role in the conceptualising, designing, realising, testing and executing of CH-3. An official statement says, “They have taken lead roles in overall spacecraft configuration, realisation of CH-3 and team management; as­sembly, integration and testing of the spacecraft; establishment and execution of ground segment for CH-3 mission operations; carrying out lander navigation guidance and control simulations to assure the capability of Lander for autonomous safe and soft landing; and development and delivery of crucial sensors like laser altimeter, laser doppler velocimeter and lander horizon­tal velocity camera that play a key role in navigation during the critical lander power descent phase, etc.” Besides Somanath, the team that is credited with making CH-3 a grand success included P Veeramuthuvel, project director, K Kalpana, associate project director, and M Srikanth, mission operations director, along with 27 other deputy project directors from different ISRO centres.

As ISRO forges ahead with newer initiatives, chairman Somanath was quoted by the Press Trust of India as saying that the space agency has decided to indigenously develop the environ­mental control and life support system (ECLSS) for the upcoming human space flight mission Gaganyaan after failing to get it from other countries. According to ISRO, the Gaganyaan project envis­ages a demonstration of human spaceflight capability by launching a crew of three members to an orbit of 400km for a three-day mis­sion and bringing them back safely to Earth by landing in the Indian Ocean. Four pilots from the Indian Air Force have been selected for the mission, and they are undergoing training at the Astronaut Training Facility in Bengaluru. Somanath told reporters that since ISRO has no experience in developing an environmental control life support system, it was expecting the knowledge to come from other nations. “But unfortunately, after so much discussion, nobody is willing to give it to us,” Somanath said in his address at the Mano­har Parrikar Vidnyan Mahotsav 2023 in Goa. ISRO states that the prerequisites for the Gaganyaan mission include the development of many critical technologies, including a human-rated launch vehicle for carrying the crew safely to space, a life support system to provide an Earth-like environment to the crew in space, a crew emergency escape provision, and evolving crew management as­pects for training, recovery and rehabilitation of crew.

As the Indian space success stories continue to get coverage all over the world, be it in a condescending or a congratulatory fashion, what cannot be ignored is that the country’s great leaps in the sector are rooted in its famed reputation for frugal innova­tion. Less has proved to be more.

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