Mars to be brighter than it has been in nearly 20 years

Nasa says October offers best chance to view red planet since 2003

Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in more than two years this month, as it reaches its point of opposition in the night’s sky.

Nasa has described the red planet’s appearance as “effectively a ‘full’ Mars”, offering the best chance to view our planetary neighbour in nearly 20 years.

On 6 October at 3.19pm BST, Mars will be the closest to Earth along its orbit, while on Tuesday, 13 October, Mars will come to opposition. At this point it will shine brighter than it has since 2003 and will not appear like this again until 2035.

Mars reaches opposition every 26 months, meaning Earth passes directly between the Sun and Mars.

October’s opposition will be extra special due to the orbits of Earth and Mars lining up to be at their closest to each other.

The astronomical phenomenon will see Mars rise as the Sun sets, and set as the Sun rises.

Combined with a new moon ‘supermoon’ in the middle of the month, it will give both casual skygazers and seasoned astronomers a rare chance to view Mars at its most spectacular.

With the naked eye, Mars will appear brighter and more distinguished in the night’s sky, while with a telescope it will be easier to make out features like polar caps and volcanoes.

Interest in Mars peaked recently, when scientists discovered multiple “water bodies” under the south pole of the planet.

The researchers said the discovery could be the key in the search for alien life, as living organisms require liquid water to survive.

October is arguably the busiest month of 2020 in terms of near-Earth astronomical events.

Full moons bookend the month, with a Harvest Moon at the beginning of October followed up by a rare Blue Moon on Halloween.

The Orionid Meteor Shower is also active from 2 October until 7 November, bringing with it “prolonged explosions of light", according to Nasa.

The peak of the meteor shower is expected to take place on 21 October, though several days will see strong showings.

The US space agency said 2020 would see an unusually large peak of meteors – commonly referred to as ‘shooting stars’ – with up to 20 occurring per hour.

Several apps and websites offer ways to track the celestial events, including Sky View and Star Chart.

(Source: The Independent)

Hope probe: UAE launches historic first mission to Mars

The United Arab Emirates' historic first mission to Mars is under way, after a successful lift-off in Japan.

The Hope probe launched on an H2-A rocket from Tanegashima spaceport, and is now on a 500-million-km journey to study the planet's weather and climate.

Two previous attempts to launch the probe in the past week had to be called off because of adverse weather.

The mission will be commanded from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre in Dubai. MBRSC

Hope's arrival in February 2021 is set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the UAE's formation.

Her Excellency Sarah Al Amiri, the science lead on Hope, spoke of her excitement and relief in seeing the rocket climb successfully into the sky. And she stated the impact on her country would be the same as that on America when its people watched the Apollo 11 Moon landing 51 years ago, also on 20 July.

"It was an anchor for an entire generation that stimulated everyone that watched it to push further and to dream bigger," she told BBC News.

@NASAPersevere

"Today I am really glad that the children in the Emirates will wake up on the morning of the 20th of July having an anchor project of their own, having a new reality, having new possibilities, allowing them to further contribute and to create a larger impact on the world."

The UAE craft is one of three missions heading to Mars this month.

The US and China both have surface rovers in the late stages of preparation. The American mission, Perseverance, sent its congratulations to Hope. "I cannot wait to join you on the journey!" its Twitter account said.

Why is the UAE going to Mars?

The UAE has limited experience of designing and manufacturing spacecraft - and yet here it is attempting something only the US, Russia, Europe and India have succeeded in doing. But it speaks to the Emiratis' ambition that they should dare to take on this challenge.

Their engineers, mentored by American experts, have produced a sophisticated probe in just six years - and when this satellite gets to Mars, it's expected to deliver novel science, revealing fresh insights on the workings of the planet's atmosphere.

In particular, scientists think it can add to our understanding of how Mars lost much of its air and with it a great deal of its water.

The Hope probe is regarded very much as a vehicle for inspiration - something that will attract more young people in the Emirates and across the Arab region to take up the sciences in school and in higher education.

Sarah Al Amiri celebrates with Naohiko Abe, from rocket operator Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Reuters

The satellite is one of a number of projects the UAE government says signals its intention to move the country away from a dependence on oil and gas and towards a future based on a knowledge economy.

But as ever when it comes to Mars, the risks are high. A half of all missions sent to the Red Planet have ended in failure. Hope project director, Omran Sharaf, recognises the dangers but insists his country is right to try.

"This is a research and development mission and, yes, failure is an option," he told BBC News.

"However, failure to progress as a nation is not an option. And what matters the most here is the capacity and the capability that the UAE gained out of this mission, and the knowledge it brought into the country."

How has the UAE managed to do this?

The UAE government told the project team it couldn't purchase the spacecraft from a big, foreign corporation; it had to build the satellite itself.

Robotic probe: Hope has taken six years to develop. MBRSC

This meant going into partnership with American universities that had the necessary experience. Emirati and US engineers and scientists worked alongside each other to design and build the spacecraft systems and the three onboard instruments that will study the planet.

While much of the satellite's fabrication occurred at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, considerable work was also undertaken at the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) in Dubai.

LASP's Brett Landin believes the Emiratis are now in a great place to do another mission on their own.

"I could give you the process for fuelling a spacecraft, but until you've put on an escape suit and transferred 800kg of highly volatile rocket fuel from storage tanks into the spacecraft, you don't really know what it's like," the senior systems engineer said.

"Their propulsion engineers have now done it and they know how to do it the next time they build a spacecraft."

What science will Hope do at Mars?

The Emiratis didn't want to do "me too" science; they didn't want to turn up at the Red Planet and repeat measurements that had already been made by others. So they went to a US space agency (Nasa) advisory committee called the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) and asked what research a UAE probe could usefully add to the current state of knowledge.

The mission is part of a policy that seeks to develop the UAE's knowledge economy. Getty Images

MEPAG's recommendations framed Hope's objectives. In one line, the UAE satellite is going to study how energy moves through the atmosphere - from bottom to top, at all times of day, and through all the seasons of the year.

It will track features such as lofted dust which on Mars hugely influences the temperature of the atmosphere.

It will also look at what's happening with the behaviour of neutral atoms of hydrogen and oxygen right at the top of the atmosphere. 

There's a suspicion these atoms play a significant role in the ongoing erosion of Mars' atmosphere by the energetic particles that stream away from the Sun.

Surface features indicate Mars once had abundant flowing water. ESA/DLR/FU BERLIN

This plays into the story of why the planet is now missing most of the water it clearly had early in its history.

To gather its observations, Hope will take up a near-equatorial orbit that stands off from the planet at a distance of 22,000km to 44,000km.

"The desire to see every piece of real estate at every time of day ended up making the orbit very large and elliptical," explained core science team lead on Hope, David Brain from LASP.

"By making those choices, we will for example be able to hover over Olympus Mons (the largest volcano in the Solar System) as Olympus Mons moves through different times of day. And at other times, we'll be letting Mars spin underneath us.

"We'll get full disc images of Mars, but our camera has filters, so we'll be doing science with those images - getting global views with different goggles on, if you like."

(Source: BBC)

Nasa spots huge 'Star Trek' logo on the surface of Mars

'Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo'

Nasa has spotted strange chevrons on Mars – and they look more than a little like an appropriate logo.

The curious shapes look remarkably like the famous logo from Star Trek and is carved into the surface of our nearby neighbour.

But the space agency is keen to stress that the icon has not been carved into the red planet by the Starfleet. "Enterprising viewers will make the discovery that these features look conspicuously like a famous logo: and you’d be right, but it’s only a coincidence," it wrote.

(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

Instead, it's a natural phenomenon that shows how Mars has developed over its history. The shapes – spotted on the Hellas Planitia plane on the south of Mars – were formed by a confluence of dunes, lava and wind that tell the story of the red planet's surface.

On ancient Mars, there were huge crescent-shaped dunes that moved over the area. At some point, an eruption meant that lava flowed around the dunes but did not reach their top.

When the lava became solid, the dunes were higher up, like islands. But the wind was still able to shift them, and it continued to blow – pushing the sand piles away.

That left behind the gaps in the lava plain that the dunes once filled. They are known as "dune casts", and set like casts made out of plaster – leaving an unchanging record of the now disappeared dust.

Zooming out, it's possible to see that there are actually a variety of the chevrons visible on the surface.

The images were taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is floating over the Mars surface onboard the space agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

(Source: Independent)

NASA's Curiosity rover finds organic matter on Mars

Organic matter has been found on Mars in soil samples taken from 3 billion-year-old mudstone in the Gale crater by the Curiosity rover, NASA announced Thursday. The rover has also detected methane in the Martian atmosphere.

The search for life outside Earth focuses on the building blocks of life as we know it, which includes organic compounds and molecules -- although these can exist without life. Organic matter can be one of several things: a record detailing ancient life, a food source for life or something that exists in the place of life.

No matter its purpose, these work as "chemical clues" for researchers about Mars.

Methane is considered the simplest organic molecule. It's present in other places in our solar system that could host life, like Saturn and Jupiter's moons Enceladus, Europa and Titan. And if life does exist elsewhere, it may be very different or even form differently from how we understand life on Earth.

The new findings are also detailed in two studies published Thursday in the journal Science. Together, the researchers believe these findings to be "breakthroughs in astrobiology."

"We have greatly expanded our search for organic compounds, which is fundamental in the search for life," said Paul Mahaffy, study author and director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The two studies build on and advance smaller detections of atmospheric methane and ancient organic compounds on Mars. Those detections either caused debate or lacked the context for understanding, the researchers said.

But Curiosity's data are providing a clearer and more conclusive picture of the conditions and processes on Mars -- and what it may have been like on the Red Planet billions of years ago, when conditions were more suitable for life.

"With these new findings, Mars is telling us to stay the course and keep searching for evidence of life," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. "I'm confident that our ongoing and planned missions will unlock even more breathtaking discoveries on the Red Planet."

Finding clues beneath the surface
We've been exploring the surface of Mars in hopes of understanding the Red Planet since NASA's Viking mission in the 1970s. The Viking Project was the first US mission to safely land spacecraft on the Martian surface, as well as send back images.

And although hopes were high that the two landers and their instruments would detect signs of life or organic compounds in samples taken from the surface, that didn't happen.

Decades later, Viking helped inspire the instruments on today's Martian rovers. And Curiosity dug a little deeper beneath the surface, which is blasted with radiation, to see what stories the soil had to tell.

Curiosity sampled sites by drilling five centimeters below the surface in the Gale crater, which is where the rover landed in 2012. The 96-mile crater, named for Australian astronomer Walter F. Gale, was most likely formed by meteor impact between 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. It likely held a lake, and now includes a mountain.

The rover was able to heat the samples to between 932 and 1508 degrees Fahrenheit and study the organic molecules released through gas analysis. The organic molecules and volatiles, comparable to samples of sedimentary rock rich in organics on Earth, included thiopene, methylthiophenes methanethiol and dimethylsulfide.

They don't exactly roll off the tongue, but researchers believe that these are fragments of larger molecules that were present on Mars billions of years ago. And the high amount of sulfur in the samples is most likely how they've lasted so long, the researchers said. Drilling beneath the surface, rather than sampling what was on top like Viking did, also helped.

Potential contaminants were analyzed and accounted for, so the results are the most conclusive yet.
"The Martian surface is exposed to radiation from space," said Jen Eigenbrode, a study author and research scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Both radiation and harsh chemicals break down organic matter. Finding ancient organic molecules in the top 5 centimeters of rock that was deposited when Mars may have been habitable bodes well for us to learn the story of organic molecules on Mars with future missions that will drill deeper."

Methane in the air
Over five years, Curiosity has used its Tunable Laser Spectrometer to measure methane in the atmosphere at the Gale crater. Before, researchers couldn't understand why the little bit of methane detected in the Martian atmosphere varied. With five years of data from a single location, they now have answers.

There is a seasonal variation to the methane that repeats, which means the methane is being released from the Martian surface or from reservoirs beneath the surface. The methane could even be trapped in water-based crystals beneath the surface.

Methane is a strong greenhouse gas, and it could have supported a climate that sustained lakes on Mars. That could even be happening beneath the surface now, the researchers said. The release of methane is an active process on Mars, which could suggest new things about what's unfolding on the Red Planet.

Detecting this organic molecule in the atmosphere, combined with the finding of organic compounds in the soil, has strong implications about potential life on Mars in its past.

The Gale Crater was probably habitable 3.5 billion years ago, based on what Curiosity has shown us. Then, the conditions would have been comparable to Earth. This is also when life was evolving on our own planet.

Knowing that these molecules and compounds were present, then, gives new strength to the idea that life originated or existed on Mars and that more work by the Martian rovers can uncover the past.
NASA's InSight Lander, launched on May 5, will land on Mars on November 26. Its two-year mission will explore Mars to see if it's "geologically alive," or active below the surface. For example, scientists want to know if it has "Mars quakes." And the Mars 2020 rover, which is expected to launch July 2020, may be able to assist with one day retrieving soil samples from Mars.

"Are there signs of life on Mars?" asked Michael Meyer, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters. "We don't know, but these results tell us we are on the right track."

(Source: CNN)

Nasa to hold major announcement about new Curiosity discovery on Mars

Agency is being very secretive about what has been discovered on Red Planet

Nasa has found exciting new "results" on Mars and will hold a press conference to reveal them, it has announced.

The agency has refused to reveal more details of what it has discovered on the Red Planet. But the new research came from the Curiosity rover that has been collecting samples from the planet, in part in an attempt to understand whether it was ever a home for alien life.

The base of Mars' Mount Sharp - the rover's eventual science destination - is pictured in this August 27, 2012 NASA handout photo taken by the Curiosity rover ( REUTERS/NASA/Handout )

Nasa's announcement only said that it would hold a press conference about "new science results from NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover". It did not give any detail on what those results were.

But it did say that a range of experts would attend the conference. They largely appear to be researchers who investigate the kinds of organic molecules that might be found in the planet's soil, and the information that might tell us about the atmosphere.

Attendees include Paul Mahaffy, who leads the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and is in charge of the analysis of samples collected by Curiosity. Researchers in geophysics and atmospheric chemistry will also attend.

The event begins at 2pm eastern, or 7pm in the UK. It will be streamed live on Nasa Television, the agency's website, and on a range of social networks and services such as Twice and YouTube.

The agency is also asking members of the public to send in questions. Those can be sent by posting on social media using the hashtag #AskNasa.

(Source: Independent)

Scientists discover clean water ice below Mars' surface

Researchers using NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) have found eight sites where thick deposits of ice beneath Mars’ surface are exposed in faces of eroding slopes.

These eight scarps, with slopes as steep as 55 degrees, reveal new information about the internal layered structure of previously detected underground ice sheets in Mars’ middle latitudes.

The ice was likely deposited as snow long ago. The deposits are exposed in cross section as relatively pure water ice, capped by a layer one to two yards (or meters) thick of ice-cemented rock and dust. They hold clues about Mars’ climate history. They also may make frozen water more accessible than previously thought to future robotic or human exploration missions.

Researchers who located and studied the scarp sites with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on MRO reported the findings in the journal Science. The sites are in both northern and southern hemispheres of Mars, at latitudes from about 55 to 58 degrees, equivalent on Earth to Scotland or the tip of South America.

A cross-section of a thick sheet of underground ice is exposed at the steep slope (or scarp) that appears bright blue in this enhanced-color view from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The view covers an area about 550 yards (500 meters) wide. Figure 1 includes a 100-meter (109-yard) scale bar. North is toward the top. The upper third of the image shows level ground that is about 140 yards (130 meters) higher in elevation than the ground in the bottom third. In between, the scarp descends sharply, exposing about 260 vertical feet (80 vertical meters) of water ice. Color is exaggerated to make differences in surface materials easier to see. The presence of exposed water ice at this site was confirmed by observation with the same orbiter’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA/USGS

“There is shallow ground ice under roughly a third of the Martian surface, which records the recent history of Mars,” said the study’s lead author, Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. “What we’ve seen here are cross-sections through the ice that give us a 3-D view with more detail than ever before.”

WINDOWS INTO UNDERGROUND ICE
The scarps directly expose bright glimpses into vast underground ice previously detected with spectrometers on NASA’s Mars Odyssey (MRO) orbiter, with ground-penetrating radar instruments on MRO and on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter, and with observations of fresh impact craters that uncover subsurface ice. NASA sent the Phoenix lander to Mars in response to the Odyssey findings; in 2008, the Phoenix mission confirmed and analyzed the buried water ice at 68 degrees north latitude, about one-third of the way to the pole from the northernmost of the eight scarp sites.

The discovery reported today gives us surprising windows where we can see right into these thick underground sheets of ice,” said Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Tucson, a co-author on today’s report. “It’s like having one of those ant farms where you can see through the glass on the side to learn about what’s usually hidden beneath the ground.”

Scientists have not determined how these particular scarps initially form. However, once the buried ice becomes exposed to Mars’ atmosphere, a scarp likely grows wider and taller as it “retreats,” due to sublimation of the ice directly from solid form into water vapor. At some of them, the exposed deposit of water ice is more than 100 yards, or meter, thick. Examination of some of the scarps with MRO’s Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) confirmed that the bright material is frozen water. A check of the surface temperature using Odyssey’s Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera helped researchers determine they’re not seeing just thin frost covering the ground.

Researchers previously used MRO’s Shallow Radar (SHARAD) to map extensive underground water-ice sheets in middle latitudes of Mars and estimate that the top of the ice is less than about 10 yards beneath the ground surface. How much less? The radar method did not have sufficient resolution to say. The new ice-scarp studies confirm indications from fresh-crater and neutron-spectrometer observations that a layer rich in water ice begins within just one or two yards of the surface in some areas.

ASTRONAUTS’ ACCESS TO MARTIAN WATER
The new study not only suggests that underground water ice lies under a thin covering over wide areas, it also identifies eight sites where ice is directly accessible, at latitudes with less hostile conditions than at Mars’ polar ice caps. “Astronauts could essentially just go there with a bucket and a shovel and get all the water they need,” Byrne said.

At this wedge-shaped pit on Mars, the steep slope (or scarp) at the northern edge (toward the top of the image) exposes a cross-section of a thick sheet of underground water ice. The image is from the High Resolution Imaging Stereo Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The gray-scale portions on left and right are from a single waveband in the red-light portion of the visible spectrum. The middle section, in enhanced color, combines data from red, near-infrared and blue-green wavebands. The scene covers an area about three miles (five kilometers) wide. Figure 1 includes a one-kilometer scale bar. One kilometer is about six-tenths of a mile. The ice-exposing scarp at the northern edge of the pit has a steepness of about 45 to 55 degrees, plunging from the relatively level ground outside the pit. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UA/USGS

The exposed ice has scientific value apart from its potential resource value because it preserves evidence about long-term patterns in Mars’ climate. The tilt of Mars’ axis of rotation varies much more than Earth’s, over rhythms of millions of years. Today the two planets’ tilts are about the same. When Mars tilts more, climate conditions may favor buildup of middle-latitude ice. Dundas and co-authors say that banding and color variations apparent in some of the scarps suggest layers “possibly deposited with changes in the proportion of ice and dust under varying climate conditions.”

This research benefited from coordinated use of multiple instruments on Mars orbiters, plus the longevities at Mars now exceeding 11 years for MRO and 16 years for Odyssey. Orbital observations will continue, but future missions to the surface could seek additional information.

“If you had a mission at one of these sites, sampling the layers going down the scarp, you could get a detailed climate history of Mars,” suggested MRO Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “It’s part of the whole story of what happens to water on Mars over time: Where does it go? When does ice accumulate? When does it recede?”

(Source: Daily Accord)

A crater on Mars is named after a city in Qatar!

There is a crater in Mars that is named after a city in Qatar. The circular crater is named after Dukhan and measures 34.04-km in diameter.

The name was adopted and approved by International Astronomical Union (AIU) on November 26, 2012.

After many missions studying Mars since the 1960s, many countries have applied for naming craters on Mars.

In Gulf countries, only Qatar and Oman have craters in Mars named after cities. Crater “Dank” is named after a place in Oman.

Here some other craters names: Degana, Bhor and Broach are named after Indian cities. Ehden after a Lebanese town. Chaman and Gwash are in Pakistan. Camiling is in Philippines, Bam is a town in Kermān province of Iran, Dush in Egypt and Alnif in Morocco also gets a carter. Check the full list of craters on Mars.

Mars surface contains large numbers of craters, Many of the craters are different than on our moon and other moons since Mars contains ice under the ground, especially in the higher latitudes.

Some of the types of craters that have special shapes due to impact into the ice-rich ground are ‘’pedestal craters’’, ‘’rampart craters’’, ‘’expanded craters’’, and ‘’LARLE craters’’.

(Source: The Peninsula)

Why India's Mars mission is so cheap - and thrilling

India's space programme has succeeded at the first attempt where others have failed - by sending an operational mission to Mars.

The Mangalyaan satellite was confirmed to be in orbit shortly after 0800, Indian time. It is, without doubt, a considerable achievement.

This is a mission that has been budgeted at 4.5bn rupees ($74m), which, by Western standards, is staggeringly cheap.

The American Maven orbiter that arrived at the Red Planet on Monday is costing almost 10 times as much.

Back in June, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi even quipped that India's real-life Martian adventure was costing less than the make-believe Hollywood film Gravity.

Even Bollywood sci-fi movies like Ra.One cost a good chunk of what it has taken to get Mangalyaan to Mars.

India's Mars orbiter
$74m
Cost of India's Mangalyaan mission
$671m
Cost of Nasa's Maven Mars mission
Launched on 5 Nov 2013
Weighs 1,350kg
Closest point to Mars 366km

So how has India done it? For sure, people costs are less in this populous nation, and the scientists and engineers working on any space mission are always the largest part of the ticket price.

Home-grown components and technologies have also been prioritised over expensive foreign imports.
But, in addition, India has been careful to do things simply.

"They've kept it small. The payload weighs only about 15kg. Compare that with the complexity in the payload in Maven and that will explain a lot about the cost," says Britain's Prof Andrew Coates, who will be a principal investigator on Europe's Mars rover in 2018.

"Of course, that reduced complexity suggests it won't be as scientifically capable, but India has been smart in targeting some really important areas that will complement what others are doing."
Mangalyaan has gone equipped with an instrument that will try to measure methane in the atmosphere.

This is one of the hottest topics in Mars research right now, following previous, tantalising observations of the gas.

Earth's atmosphere contains billions of tonnes of methane, the vast majority of it coming from microbes, such as the organisms found in the digestive tracts of animals.

The speculation has been that some methane-producing bugs, or methanogens, could perhaps exist on Mars if they lived underground, away from the planet's harsh surface conditions.

It is a fascinating prospect.

So, even though Mangalyaan has a small payload, it will actually address some of the biggest questions at the Red Planet.

Western scientists are excited also to have the Indian probe on station.

Its measurements of other atmospheric components will dovetail very nicely with Maven and the observations being made by Europe's Mars Express. "It means we'll be getting three-point measurements, which is tremendous," says Prof Coates.

This will enable researchers to better understand how the planet lost the bulk of its atmosphere billions of years ago, and determine what sort of climate it could once have had, and whether or not it was conducive to life.

I have read a lot about the criticism of Mangalyaan and India's space programme.

There's an assumption among many, I guess, that space activity is somehow a plaything best left to wealthy industrial countries; that it can have no value to developing nations.

The money would be better spent on healthcare and improved sanitation, so the argument goes.
But what this position often overlooks is that investment in science and technology builds capability and capacity, and develops the sort of people who benefit the economy and society more widely.

Space activity is also a wealth generator. Some of the stuff we do up there pays for stuff down here.
The industrialised nations know it; that's one of the reasons they invest so heavily in space activity.
Consider just the UK. It has dramatically increased its spending on space in recent years.

The government has even identified satellites as being one of the "eight great technologies" that can help rebalance the UK economy and drive it forward.

India wants a part of this action, too, and in Mangalyaan and its other satellite and rocket programmes, the nation is putting itself into a strong position in international markets for space products and services.

(Source: BBC)