Nasa sidelining India's moon men?

[DesiGuy]

MUMBAI: Has the path-breaking discovery of water on the moon by Chandrayaan-1 robbed Indian scientists of their due? Some Indian lunar scientists feel that their role has been completely sidelined by their American counterparts, who were also a part of the Rs 386-crore lunar mission.

The discovery was done by three instruments on board Chandrayaan-1. These were the CHACE (Chandra's Altitudinal Composition Explorer), one of the three payloads of the indigenous Moon Impact Probe (MIP), the Moon Minerology Mapper (M3) and Mini-Sar, both belonging to NASA.

Last year, on September 25, Madhavan Nair, who was then chairman of ISRO, declared at a hurriedly-convened media meet in Bangalore that the MIP had detected water on the moon. According to him, the India-made probe, a brainchild of former president A P J Abdul Kalam, picked up the signals about the presence of water during its 25-minute flight to the moon on the night of November 14, 2008.

However, subsequently, there has been a huge debate as to who attained the breakthrough first — India or the US? Documents made available to TOI show that the MIP was activated on November 14, 2008, the Mini-Sar started functioning 72 hours later on November 17 and the M3 became operational on November 22, eight days after the landing of the MIP on the moon. It became fully active on December 17, 2008.

According to the Indian scientists, who declined to be identified, fearing repercussions on the job front, the sequence of events proves that it was the Indian MIP that made the discovery first. Despite this, they regret, NASA has walked away with the prize and no effort has been made by India to straighten out the facts.
"The 10-month delay in announcing our discovery has proved dear," remarked a scientist.

Nair justified this delay saying that since MIP's was only a 25-minute flight on November 14, 2008 — from 8.06 pm to 8.31 pm — ISRO did not want to rush to publicise its achievement without a proper analysis of the data.

But India's part in the discovery of lunar water continues to be downplayed. In a podcast organized by NASA's Lunar Science Institute titled Water on the Moon on April 29, there is no mention of the role played by the CHACE payload on board the MIP, designed and developed at the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre's Space Physics Institute at Thiruvanathanapuram. The entire credit has gone to NASA.

Last week TOI emailed a questionnaire to Carle Pieters, principal investigator of M3, seeking her comments, but there was no response.

A top scientist connected with the Chandrayaan mission, Syed Maqbool Ahmed, who was the project manager of the CHACE payload, declared openly last week on a website called '365 Days Of Astronomy':
"Our results were rejected by Science journal in March 2009 and Nature in August 2009. Now they have appeared in Planetary and Space Sciences, which is a British journal."

In another comment on the website of the US Planetary Society, he spoke about the agony of waiting till March 2010 to get recognition. "Maybe it was a price we had to pay for not being frontrunners in the field of space."


Nasa sidelining India's moon men? - India - The Times of India

 

[Patriot]

Yeah NASA should put on its home that Indian's astronauts are better then US astronauts.Guys why are you so obsessed with the world?Why do you not have self confidence?Why do you need Americans seal of approval?

 

[Creder]

@patriot i dont think its a matter of obsession..personally i had no clue about India being a fortrunner in discovering water but if that is the case and they can prove then i think credit should be given where its due

Also i doubt you would call us self-obssessed if we were in their shoes..its a matter of getting credit for hard work.

 

[sparklingway]

Yeah NASA should put on its home that Indian's astronauts are better then US astronauts.Guys why are you so obsessed with the world?Why do you not have self confidence?Why do you need Americans seal of approval?

Do you know the topic that is being dealt with in the above posted article? I'm guessing you're clueless about the whole issue and merely understood the words NASA and Moon. Where did "astronauts" come from in a debate over which payload aboard the Chandrayaan-1 was first to detect the 3 micrometer Infrared spectroscopic absorption that verified the presence of the hydroxyl group thereby proving the existence of water on the Moon.

If indeed it was the MIP that made the discovery before the M3, then ISRO deserves even more commendation and praise for its efforts. I say even more because it was their lunar probe that completed the mission already and was responsible for breakthrough results despite its less than expected lifetime. Thumbs up to ISRO.

 

[jha]

Yeah NASA should put on its home that Indian's astronauts are better then US astronauts.Guys why are you so obsessed with the world?Why do you not have self confidence?Why do you need Americans seal of approval?

cool it man...dont over do it..

 

[qsaark]

A top scientist connected with the Chandrayaan mission, Syed Maqbool Ahmed, who was the project manager of the CHACE payload, declared openly last week on a website called '365 Days Of Astronomy':
"Our results were rejected by Science journal in March 2009 and Nature in August 2009. Now they have appeared in Planetary and Space Sciences, which is a British journal."

Why the results were not resubmitted with revisions (if asked)? Finding water on moon is not kind of a research that would land someone a Nobel prize and even if it was, it would not be correct to put the blame on Science and Nature's reviewers and editors. There is no question that these two journals have set their bar exceptionally high but it also does not mean that they would reject some findings only because they were made by the Indian Scientists. If the findings were rejected, I have all the reasons and faith to believe that either the data was not sufficient or it was not well analyzed. The fact that the findings were later published in a lower tiered journal suggests that data was not worthy of publishing in Science or Nature even in its revised form and it has nothing to do with American of British Journal.

One more thing, the journal "Planetary and Space Science" is published by Elsevier, a part of the Reed Elsevier group based in Amsterdam, founded by Lodewijk Elzevir back in 1580. Elesvier has its operations both in the United Kingdom and USA and its journals are not recognized as British Journals unlike Oxford Journals which are very much British.

 

[sparklingway]

Perhaps the scientists who were analyzing data from the MIP didn't really go through the data until after Science had published the paper from the NASA scientists based on the data collected from the M3. This is a realizable case.

The paper in Science appeared on September 24 and the very next day the ISRO said that infact it was the MIP not the M3 which was the first to record the data of the spectroscopic absorption. Perhaps, the scientists analyzing data from the M3 worked out their results before the ones working on the MIP data.

This does not in any way suggest that there was a bias towards Indian scientists or any exceptional favour done for the American ones.