Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Chandrayaan 2

  • Enfeebling the Indian space programme

    There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.

    Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.

    The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)

    On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.

    At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.

    For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.

    It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.

    Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.

    Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.

    But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.

    Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.

  • 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 ideologues cometh for the IITs

    In July 2019, when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched its Chandrayaan 2 mission, the spiritual guru Jaggi Vasudev was present in the control centre, along with other dignitaries, getting a close view of the launch from a balcony. After the launch, he was seen taking photographs with the scientists in the room. Many people (myself included) were irked as to how, of all the people ISRO could have chosen to invite for such an occasion, it picked Jaggi Vasudev, who regularly makes pseudoscientific claims in public and has floated questionable initiatives like ‘Cauvery Calling’ even as his foundation has angered locals for encroaching ecologically sensitive land, damaging water resources and farmland in Tamil Nadu. Surely there were better invitees?

    A year or so later, someone who is highly likely to have been aware of the true circumstances of Jaggi’s presence in the control room told me that ISRO didn’t invite him. Jaggi just showed up at ISRO’s doorstep, and they were obligated to let him in and show him around. We had assumed there had been an invitation because it is not possible for the rest of us to simply show up and be let into the control room gallery. After the launch, Jaggi tweeted, “#Chandrayaan2 is the outcome of the brilliance and extraordinary commitment of our scientists of @ISRO and also the political will. This phenomenal achievement is the pride of our nation. Just couldn’t help being there.” The mention of ‘political will’ in that tweet was an important indication. Even if it wasn’t as ostentatious as later tweets by others would be, it didn’t prove anything. It was just of a piece with events two months later.

    In September 2019, the Chandrayaan 2 mission’s lander crashed on the lunar surface, leaving only the orbiter part of the mission to succeed. But the then ISRO chairman K. Sivan dubbed the mission a “98% success” (without explaining his calculus) even as the rest of the organisation withdrew into a shell, cutting the information flow into a feeble trickle. We didn’t know that Vikram, the lander, had crashed or the telemetry data based on which ISRO had reached that conclusion, until later.

    Today, on November 18, 2022, an Indian company called Skyroot Aerospace launched its first indigenous rocket from ISRO’s spaceport in Sriharikota – an important achievement, a milestone in the country’s reforms to increase private sector involvement in the spaceflight sector. But before and after the launch itself, the telecast was concerned inordinately with the glory of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and of his government. Piyush Goyal called it “an achievement led by PM” – a patently false assertion that also overlooked the scientists and engineers who had worked on the mission.

    In December 2021, IIT Kharagpur published a “Vedic calendar” prepared by an Indian Knowledge Systems Centre at the institute of eminence. It was riddled with ahistorical claims, twisted in a way to support, among other things, the idea that the Aryans were the native people of Bharat rather than immigrants from Eastern Europe and that, to borrow historian Meera Nanda’s words, “the well-known “Pashupati seal” found in Mohenjo-Daro in 1928, which depicts a figure seated in a yoga-like posture, wearing a horned head-gear with animals surrounding him, is no “proto-Shiva” but a full-fledged Vedic-Puranic Shiva who is the “column of cosmic light and aeons of time” (whatever that means).” A centre for ‘Indian knowledge systems’ already exists in IIT Gandhinagar as well and, Nanda speculated, IIT Kanpur could be next in line.

    Speaking of IIT Kanpur: on November 11, the institute tweeted from its official handle that spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar would conduct a “national induction” on the same day “for the first-year students of all the national institutes of importance” (there are 25). The tweet asked people to visit Ravi Shankar’s “Art of Living’s YouTube channel” to view the talk.

    Finally, two days back, the University Grants Commission (UGC) asked universities across the country to hold lectures on November 26, Constitution Day, to push the idea of India as the world’s “mother of democracy” and that ancient India had a democratic government in its Vedic period. The incumbent UGC chairman, M. Jagadesh Kumar, made a name for himself as the Jawaharlal Nehru University vice-chancellor who did nothing as a small mob of miscreants, affiliated with the youth wing of the BJP, went on a rampage through the campus, damaging property and attacking students. Now, Kumar has written to 45 universities, 45 deemed-to-be universities and to the governors of states (who are the chancellors of state universities) to “encourage” these lectures.

    This is what the BJP’s ideological programme taking over India’s ostensible centres of scientific research excellence looks like – not by (physical) violence, not by harassing professors and students who oppose their ideology, not by jailing peaceful protestors, but by opening the door in small increments, using the universities’ names and symbols on propaganda material, by adding ‘centres’ and ‘lectures’ to them instead of subtracting their powers, and by taking control of the public narratives of their achievements.

    Featured image credit: Dewang Gupta/Unsplash.

  • ISRO’s national interest bullshit

    For data and other objects, like images and videos, it places in the public domain, the Indian government attaches the GODL license – short for ‘government open data license’. The terms of this license are fairly straightforward: that

    … all users are provided a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, adapt, publish (either in original, or in adapted and/or derivative forms), translate, display, add value, and create derivative works (including products and services), for all lawful commercial and non-commercial purposes, and for the duration of existence of such rights over the data or information.

    There is then an attribution requirement:

    The user must acknowledge the provider, source, and license of data by explicitly publishing the attribution statement, including the DOI (Digital Object Identifier), or the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), or the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) of the data concerned.

    But despite the breadth of its permissions, the license isn’t obviously liberal because of some exceptions (emphasis added):

    The license does not cover the following kinds of data: a. personal information; b. data that is non-shareable and/or sensitive; c. names, crests, logos and other official symbols of the data provider(s); d. data subject to other intellectual property rights, including patents, trade-marks and official marks; e. military insignia; f. identity documents; and g. any data that should not have been publicly disclosed for the grounds provided under section 8 of the Right to Information [RTI] Act, 2005.

    Note the last one, (g). I have been interested in the GODL license because it is the license on images produced by ISRO and uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons catalogue. I have written about the problems with this licensing setup at length here (principally, a. the license only covers objects published after 2012 and b. ISRO retains the copyright on all its products through a separate statement on its website). In this context, the exception under Section 8 of the RTI Act is notable: it seems quite reasonable, except for the fact that the Indian government has of late applied this limitation to the most innocuous of queries under the Act.

    A new case in point came with Pradeep Mohandas’s newsletter this morning. Twitter user @frustratedpluto filed an RTI applicatio with ISRO seeking answers to 10 queries, transcribed below from screenshots the user shared on Twitter. Look at the responses they received.

    1. Provide what constitutes in Lander Sensor Performance Test (LSPT) Phase-3 test in general?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    2. Has LSPT Phase-3 test for Chandrayaan-3 has been conducted? If yes, provide me when was it done? If no, provide when will it likely to be conducted?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    3. Provide me the number of Lander Actuator Performance Test (LAPT) were done for Chandrayaan-2?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    4. Provide me if any LAPT test done for five engine configuration?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    5. Are there any LAPT planned for Chandrayaan-3 mission? If yes, then provide me names of ISRO facilities would be used to conduct it?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    6. Provide me the location of NASA LRA Payload onboard Vikram lander of Chandrayaan-2? (Please illustrate on a diagram if possible).

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    7. Provide me finalised design of Chandrayaan-3 mission

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    8. Provide me the expected launch timeline of Aditya L1 and Exposat mission

    Based on the present assessment and taking into account the COVID restrictions, the launch is planned in third Quarter of 2022.

    9. Provide me the number of payloads for Aditya L1 have been received to ISRO from PI institutes?

    The information sought is exempted from disclosure under Section-8(1)(a) of RTI Act as it would prejudicially affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest of the state / country.

    10. Provide me how much time will Aditya L1 take to reach L1 point after being lifted off from ground?

    Mission planning is under progress and it will be decided in due course.

    This is an absolute travesty. Given the extent to which ISRO has invoked exemptions under Section 8 of the RTI Act, you might think Chandrayaan 3 is an orbital weapon, not an S&T mission. These replies, such as they are, have one of two possible implications: either, as @frustratedpluto has noted, they reflect an irresponsible laziness on the part of ISRO staff responsible for addressing RTI applications or they provide a peek into what the government considers to be proprietary information in the nationalistic sense – something to be fiercely guarded against threats as considerable, and as vague, as the national interest.

    A notable government official said at a meeting I attended early last year that one shouldn’t attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence. But here, confronted with a choice between these two causes of ISRO’s reticence, accusing it of something as slight as incompetence would be laughable.

    This is more so when:

    a) We have all been witness to a significant decline in ISRO’s outreach efforts over the last half-decade or so and, more importantly, the people’s and journalists’ ability to access its scientists for information on ISRO missions;

    b) K. Sivan’s leadership of the organisation has been marked by statements from his and his colleagues’ offices that seem grossly out of touch with reality (perhaps most famously: Sivan’s comment that the failed Chandrayaan 2 mission was a “98% success”)

    (A related point here is that by claiming that details of tests like the LAPT and the LSPT are central to India’s scientific and technical interests to the extent that ISRO can’t share their details, the organisation is letting itself, and its mandate and goals, become appropriated by the political establishment, as well as – thanks to its troll army – helping sustain narratives that the establishment is hard at work protecting India from previously unknown threats, one of which might be people like @frustratedpluto asking ‘dangerous’ questions about science missions); and

    c) The country’s political leadership has made subtle attempts to coopt ISRO missions to its electoral advantage.

    In fact, the importance The Party places on giving the impression that is in complete control of The Situation (which can be any situation) is impossible to overstate:

    The current Government of India is clearly determined to constantly be right and constantly on higher ground, nothing less. To realise these conditions, it lies, evades, deceives and hides when a time comes for it to say it was wrong. When there is a mistake, or even when something entirely out of its control happens, it tries to lie the problem away, either to give the impression that the problem didn’t exist in the first place or that it has found a solution against all odds.

    ‘India COVID-19 Response Suggests ‘Scientific Superpower’ Tag an Impossible Dream’, The Wire Science, December 2020

    On top of all this, @frustratedpluto has been trolled on Twitter for seeking details of the final design of Chandrayaan 3. I really cannot see a straight line between this question and the answer that sharing this information would “affect the scientific, technical and strategic interest” of India, but it is tempting to see here glimpses of the Supreme Leader’s Midas touch and its ongoing disruption of our scientific enterprise.

    In this context, the GODL license may be small fry – but the fact remains that the government could take it away or limit its terms, in turn further affecting our access to even the photos and videos that ISRO produces, if the government behind it senses even a small threat to its sense of control, leave alone perfectly harmless details about upcoming science missions.

    Featured image: ISRO’s PSLV C45 before launch (with modified colours). Credit: Twitter/ISRO.

  • Being on the NSI podcast

    Narayan Prasad, the CEO of SatSearch, hosts a popular podcast called NewSpace India. Every episode, he hosts one person and they talk about something related to the Indian and international space programmes. I was the guest for the episode published January 17, available to listen here (on transistor.fm), in which NP and I discussed India’s space journalism scene and ISRO’s public outreach policies.

    Addendum: Where I’m talking about the comparisons between Jonathan McDowell and T.S. Kelso in the West and members of the ISRO subreddit, I repeatedly come back to the ‘not enough information’ bit. But later, I realised I should’ve added that McDowell and Kelso, and others, were probably encouraged to pursue their hobbies by access to knowledge and freely available information whereas India’s space-sleuths, so to speak, seem to be prompted more by the lack of information and knowledge about the national spaceflight programme.

    So the former is a productive exercise whereas the latter is compensatory, and whose members’ efforts can be spared – or put to better use in other directions – if only ISRO spoke up more.

    Another thing is that I may have overstated the extent to which I’m willing to forgive ISRO its PR fumbles because it’s an outreach noob. I meant to say that if ISRO can be cut any kind of slack, it would have to be on this front alone – but even then not much, and certainly not to any extent that would cede enough room for it to engage in the sort of coverup exercise it did with the CY-2 fiasco in September 2019.

    NP is among the most knowledgable members of India’s space science and spaceflight communities, and has consulted for ISRO as well as a number of private companies on policy, strategy and business. I regularly follow his articles and his podcast, and I recommend you do too if you want to get a handle on the ins and outs of India’s modern spaceflight endeavour. The podcast is also available on Apple, Spotify and other platforms.

  • A new map of Titan

    It’s been a long time since I’ve obsessed over Titan, primarily because after the Cassini mission ended, the pace of updates about Titan died down, and because other moons of the Solar System (Europa, Io, Enceladus, Ganymede and our own) became more important. There have been three or four notable updates since my last post about Titan but this post that you’re reading has been warranted by the fact that scientists recently released the first global map of the Saturnian moon.

    (This Nature article offers a better view but it’s copyrighted. The image above is a preview offered by Nature Astronomy; the paper itself is behind a paywall and I couldn’t find a corresponding copy on Sci-Hub or arXiv nor have I written to the corresponding author – yet.)

    It’s fitting that Titan be accorded this privilege – of a map of all locations on the planetary body – because it is by far the most interesting of the Solar System’s natural satellites (although Europa and Triton come very close) and were it not orbiting the ringed giant, it could well be a planet of its own accord. I can think of a lot of people who’d agree with this assessment but most of them tend to focus on Titan’s potential for harbouring life, especially since NASA’s going to launch the Dragonfly mission to the moon in 2026. I think they’ve got it backwards: there are a lot of factors that need to come together just right for any astronomical body to host life, and fixating on habitability combines these factors and flattens them to a single consideration. But Titan is amazing because it’s got all these things going on, together with many other features that habitability may not be directly concerned with.

    While this is the first such map of Titan, and has received substantial coverage in the popular press, it isn’t the first global assessment of its kind. Most recently, in December 2017, scientists (including many authors of the new paper) published two papers of the moon’s topographical outlay (this and this), based on which they were able to note – among other things – that Titan’s three seas have a common sea level; many lakes have surfaces hundreds of meters above this level (suggesting they’re elevated and land-locked); many lakes are connected under the surface and drain into each other; polar lakes (the majority) are bordered by “sharp-edged depressions”; and Titan’s crust has uneven thickness as evidenced by its oblateness.

    According to the paper’s abstract, the new map brings two new kinds of information to the table. First, the December 2017 papers were based on hi- and low-res images of about 40% of Titan’s surface whereas, for the new map, the authors write: “Correlations between datasets enabled us to produce a global map even where datasets were incomplete.” More specifically, areas for which authors didn’t have data from Cassini’s Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument for were mapped at 1:2,000,000 scale whereas areas with data enabled a map at 1:8,000,000 scale. Second is the following inferences of the moon’s geomorphology (from the abstract the authors presented to a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in October 2018):

    We have used all available datasets to extend the mapping initially done by Lopes et al. We now have a global map of Titan at 1:800,000 scale in all areas covered by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). We have defined six broad classes of terrains following Malaska et al., largely based on prior mapping. These broad classes are: craters, hummocky/mountainous, labyrinth, plains, lakes, and dunes [see image below]. We have found that the hummocky/mountainous terrains are the oldest units on the surface and appear radiometrically cold, indicating icy materials. Dunes are the youngest units and appear radiometrically warm, indicating organic sediments.

    SAR images of the six morphological classes (in the order specified in the abstract)

    More notes once I’ve gone through the paper more thoroughly. And if you’d like to read more about Titan, here’s a good place to begin.

  • 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 alleged politicisation of science

    “Don’t politicise X” has become the defence of choice for a class of scientists and public intellectuals in India whose class and caste privilege utterly blinds them to various inequities in the practice of science – as privilege is wont to do – and who labour with the presumption that these inequities, should they miraculously become aware of a few, don’t affect what new knowledge is produced and how it affects relationships predicated on a power imbalance in the wider society.

    Consider a simple example: men and women are equally capable of being good scientists, but there aren’t many women the further down the academic pipeline you go because they have been driven out by their male colleagues’ and supervisors’ sexism and misogyny. As a result, a lot of modern scientific research simply collects the results of questions that men asked and questions that the same or other men answered. This problem impoverishes the scientific undertaking by depriving it of the insights and sensibilities of a significant section of society.

    The way ahead from here should not be to ‘normalise’ things because the normal has come to mean the preservation of the status quo, in terms of protecting men and safeguarding their domains as temples of patriarchy; there can be progress only with near-constant struggle and pushback, and among non-male scientists as well as non-male workers, together with their male colleagues and peers, in all endeavours of modernity. It would in turn be impossible for such a historic movement to be non-political or apolitical.

    A part of the problem is rooted in the demonisation of politics, at least the label itself. ‘To politicise’ has come to mean to infuse an endeavour with partisanship where there has thus far been harmony, with incentives that suppress intelligent decision-making with the simpler algorithms of populism. However, when such harmony and intelligence are products of oppression, they must go.

    A male PI’s contention that women in the lab will “distract” men – as the Nobel laureate Tim Hunt said – or that they are unlikely to be available to run experiments owing to menstruation or pregnancy should prompt us to reexamine how labs are organised, the rights and freedoms of female lab-workers, and how the university frames the relationship between labour and research, and not have us considering if women should be allowed to work in labs at all. In a different context, many Indians on discussion forums and social media platforms have recently become fond of demanding that I, or anyone else, “shouldn’t politicise space”. But space has become interesting and lucrative only because it has been politicised.

    “Politics,” according to Wikipedia, “is a set of activities associated with the governance of a country or an area.” In this regard, it should seem impossible for any endeavour, no matter how small or fleeting, to remain untouched by the influence of the politics of the people undertaking the endeavour. Caste-based and gender-based discrimination are obvious manifestations of this truism in Indian society; for another, consider the following snippet from an article I (first) published in July. It summarises the extent to which public policy influences the possible trajectories of scientific careers in India:

    Consider a scientist from the developing world. Let’s say he is a male, English-speaking middle-class Brahmin so we can set aside the ceaseless discrimination the scientific community’s non-male, non-Hindu/non-upper-caste, non-heterosexual, Indian-language-speaking members face for the sake of our discussion. The picture has already been oversimplified. This scientist has access to some instruments, a few good labs, not many good mentors, irregular funding, not enough travel grants, subpar employment prospects, insufficient access to journals, lives in a polluted city with uneven public transport, rising costs of living, less water to spare and rising medical bills. If at this juncture we reinstate the less privileged Indian in this matrix, it becomes a near-chaotic picture of personal, social, economic and political problems. Even then, it is still only the substrate upon which international inequities – such as access to samples from other parts of India and the world, information published in journals that libraries can’t afford or exclusion from the editorial boards of scientific journals – will come to bear. Finally, there is the climate crisis and its discomfiting history.

    For a less obvious example: Chandrayaan 2 has been widely touted as a technological as well as scientific mission. However, in the lead up to the mission’s launch on July 22 as well as after the unfortunate events of September 7, ISRO’s focus as well as that of the people and most journalists has remained on the mission’s technological aspects. In fact, ISRO chairman K. Sivan declared on September 22 that the mission had been a 98% success when its scientific phase had barely begun – that is, that Chandrayaan 2’s scientific mission constitutes only 2% of the whole thing.

    As bizarre as this sounds, these proclamations are in line with ISRO’s relatively poor track record of executing sophisticated scientific missions. This should force us to confront the political economics of science administration in India – whereby those in power have become increasingly unwilling to fund non-applied research thanks to the rising influence of populist politics and its predilection for short-term gains. This is in addition to the relationships central and state-level funding agencies have with the receivers of their money, how such money is distributed between elite and non-elite institutes, and how nationalism shields ISRO from backlash as it centralises authority and further limits public outreach.

    There are many other examples to illustrate that there is no such thing as the politicisation of X inasmuch as there is either the acknowledgment of this truth or its denial. But if you are still grasping for an out, there is one. There are two broad ways to divide the public perception of what politics is: the kind concerned with the principles by which we govern ourselves as a peaceful and productive society, and the kind concerned with maximising media exposure and perpetuating the inefficiencies of bureaucracy.

    The influence of the former is inescapable by design and must be guided by reason and debate; the influence of the latter is regrettable and must be rejected for its small-mindedness at every opportunity. If one takes a charitable view of those fond of saying “don’t politicise X”, one would hope that they are speaking of politics of the second variety: the dirty realpolitik and its Machiavellian ambitions. But a less charitable, and an arguably more justified, view suggests that many scientists – in India at least – lack an appreciation of the politics of principles, a politics of social justice if you will.

    Indeed, it is curious that many of them, together with many non-scientists as well, often prefer a more scientistic outlook, whereby the traditionally imagined ‘scientific’ disciplines and the knowledge these endeavours supply are considered to be incontestably superior to alternatives derived from, say, sociological studies or even paralogical systems like religion and traditional beliefs. To quote the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, “Neither science nor rationality are universal measures of excellence. They are particular traditions, unaware of their historical grounding.” (Source: Against Method, fourth ed., p. 223.)

    But modern society considers politicisation to be a greater threat than scientism whereas historians of science brim with anecdotes about how the scientific endeavour remains constantly on the cusp of being weaponised in the absence of political safeguards that regulate its practice. The ongoing nationalist project to debase non-scientific research typifies this; to quote from an older post on this blog:

    … the left has been painted as anti-fact and the right [as being guided] by righteous logic when in fact this is the result of the deeper dismissal of the validity of the social sciences and humanities, which have served throughout history to make facts right and workable in their various contexts. The right has appropriated the importance of quantitative measures – and that alone – and brandishes it like a torch. … And by attacking the validity of the social sciences and humanities, the left has effectively had the rug pulled out from under its feet, and the intellectual purpose of its existence delegitimised.

    Not all of us may fully appreciate how we got here, but there is no question that we are indeed here – and that the way forward must be cognisant of, if not entirely critical of, the alleged politicisation of science and the political agendas of the perpetrators of this idea.