Better to send an unmannned rover to Mars. So far the US is the only nation to successfully send a rover to Mars and have it survive more than a short time after landing there. They have had a run of luck with Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity, and overall have had remarkable success - so it is easy to get the idea it is routine - but even the US has had one failed lander, and over all 50% of unmanned landers and rovers to Mars fail.
The NASA missions to Mars surface go
Viking 1 (1976): success
Viking 2 (1976): success
Pathfinder (1996): success
Mars Polar Lander (1999): crashed
Opportunity (2004): success, still operational
Spirit (2004): success
Phoenix (2007): success
Curiosity: success, still operational
It's partly a matter of chance, hard to avoid boulders totally in the landing ellipse, and, so far anyway, they have no methods of detecting and avoiding them during the landing sequence.
Viking 1 landed within a few meters of a boulder that would have destroyed it
But we have better images of the surface now so easier to choose areas with very few obstacles in them.
Russia has:
Mars 2MV-3 (1963) failed to reach Earth's orbit
Mars 2 (1971) crashed on Mars
Mars 3 (1973) First successful landing, transmitted for 15 seconds only
Mars 6 (1973) Crashed, data during descent
Mars 7 (1973) didn't reach Mars surface, in orbit around sun
Mars 96 (1996) failure on launch
UK has:
Beagle 2 (2003) landing failure
It's perhaps not as bad as it seems, skewed by Russia's many early missions back in the 1960s and early 1970s, plus the failure on launch of its Mars 96.
And US certainly had a run of good missions, 7 successful missions out of 8.
The attempt to copy the Pathfinder air bags landing with Beagle failed - that though was a poorly funded mission, and didn't have e.g. the telemetry needed to find out what went wrong on landing.
Seems to me, at least possible that India could succeed. Perhaps using airbags, probably simpler than sky crane.
For that budget, who knows, maybe India could send an unmanned rover to Mars, and join a select club of just one nation so far who have achieved that.
Though they'd need to be willing to risk a probably still quite high chance of the mission failing, and best if they have a recurring budget so you can try again after learning from their failures (and be sure to have lots of good telemetry so you know what went wrong).
The ESA plan to send ExoMars to Mars in 2018 (with a precursor mission to test the technology, a technology demo basically).
The UK tried to send Beagle there (hitchhiking on another mission) but failed.
It's a major challenge, trickiest descent in the inner solar system because the atmosphere is too thin for a normal parachute ascent all the way but too thick for a powered descent all the way like the Moon, so you end up with these complex three stage descents, and everything has to go right.
So, I think India with its programming and technical expertise has a chance there.
But still, might be an idea to start with a simpler target first, to land a rover on the Moon, like China.
Are some really interesting targets on the Moon such as the polar ice deposits, and we have almost no ground data on the lunar surface, just a few spots for Apollo, the Russian missions, and China's rover.
Also could land a human on the Moon - but that's a major challenge.
As for rover to Mars, then for some reason NASA, year after year, since Viking has refused to add any life detection experiments to any of their missions to Mars. The few spots on their spacecraft end up as geology experiments instead.
The ESA's ExoMars is going to be the first mission to send life detection experiments to Mars since the 1970s.
So - if India was to propose a life detection mission to the surface of Mars, searching for either past or present life, you'd get the exobiologists of the world keen to suggest experiments and propose equipment to go on your mission. Things they've been trying to get sent to Mars for decades now, and getting improved all the time as they work on them. They continue to work on the experiments, but for some reason none of them ever get accepted by NASA to fly to Mars.
They nearly did it a few years back when NASA was going to partner with the ESA and they developed the Urey suite of instruments to search for life on Mars. But then NASA pulled out of that agreement, leaving the ESA to go it alone - eventually they partnered with Russia instead.
So are many good experiments of that type that could be sent to Mars, and also a lot of prior research on the best places on Mars to send them to.
India could also explore some of the many very innovative ideas for missions to the Mars surface, such as, for instance, lightweight planes that can land on the surface and take off again, or balloons in the Mars atmosphere, and many others.
Many of these would be impressive just as a technology demo no matter what instruments they have on board, and if you add some lightweight life detection instruments as well could be truly innovative.
Soaring, Buzzing, Floating, Hopping, Crawling And Inflatable Mars Rovers - Suggestions For UAE Mars Lander
The NASA missions to Mars surface go
Viking 1 (1976): success
Viking 2 (1976): success
Pathfinder (1996): success
Mars Polar Lander (1999): crashed
Opportunity (2004): success, still operational
Spirit (2004): success
Phoenix (2007): success
Curiosity: success, still operational
It's partly a matter of chance, hard to avoid boulders totally in the landing ellipse, and, so far anyway, they have no methods of detecting and avoiding them during the landing sequence.
Viking 1 landed within a few meters of a boulder that would have destroyed it
But we have better images of the surface now so easier to choose areas with very few obstacles in them.
Russia has:
Mars 2MV-3 (1963) failed to reach Earth's orbit
Mars 2 (1971) crashed on Mars
Mars 3 (1973) First successful landing, transmitted for 15 seconds only
Mars 6 (1973) Crashed, data during descent
Mars 7 (1973) didn't reach Mars surface, in orbit around sun
Mars 96 (1996) failure on launch
UK has:
Beagle 2 (2003) landing failure
It's perhaps not as bad as it seems, skewed by Russia's many early missions back in the 1960s and early 1970s, plus the failure on launch of its Mars 96.
And US certainly had a run of good missions, 7 successful missions out of 8.
The attempt to copy the Pathfinder air bags landing with Beagle failed - that though was a poorly funded mission, and didn't have e.g. the telemetry needed to find out what went wrong on landing.
Seems to me, at least possible that India could succeed. Perhaps using airbags, probably simpler than sky crane.
For that budget, who knows, maybe India could send an unmanned rover to Mars, and join a select club of just one nation so far who have achieved that.
Though they'd need to be willing to risk a probably still quite high chance of the mission failing, and best if they have a recurring budget so you can try again after learning from their failures (and be sure to have lots of good telemetry so you know what went wrong).
The ESA plan to send ExoMars to Mars in 2018 (with a precursor mission to test the technology, a technology demo basically).
The UK tried to send Beagle there (hitchhiking on another mission) but failed.
It's a major challenge, trickiest descent in the inner solar system because the atmosphere is too thin for a normal parachute ascent all the way but too thick for a powered descent all the way like the Moon, so you end up with these complex three stage descents, and everything has to go right.
So, I think India with its programming and technical expertise has a chance there.
But still, might be an idea to start with a simpler target first, to land a rover on the Moon, like China.
Are some really interesting targets on the Moon such as the polar ice deposits, and we have almost no ground data on the lunar surface, just a few spots for Apollo, the Russian missions, and China's rover.
Also could land a human on the Moon - but that's a major challenge.
As for rover to Mars, then for some reason NASA, year after year, since Viking has refused to add any life detection experiments to any of their missions to Mars. The few spots on their spacecraft end up as geology experiments instead.
The ESA's ExoMars is going to be the first mission to send life detection experiments to Mars since the 1970s.
So - if India was to propose a life detection mission to the surface of Mars, searching for either past or present life, you'd get the exobiologists of the world keen to suggest experiments and propose equipment to go on your mission. Things they've been trying to get sent to Mars for decades now, and getting improved all the time as they work on them. They continue to work on the experiments, but for some reason none of them ever get accepted by NASA to fly to Mars.
They nearly did it a few years back when NASA was going to partner with the ESA and they developed the Urey suite of instruments to search for life on Mars. But then NASA pulled out of that agreement, leaving the ESA to go it alone - eventually they partnered with Russia instead.
So are many good experiments of that type that could be sent to Mars, and also a lot of prior research on the best places on Mars to send them to.
India could also explore some of the many very innovative ideas for missions to the Mars surface, such as, for instance, lightweight planes that can land on the surface and take off again, or balloons in the Mars atmosphere, and many others.
Many of these would be impressive just as a technology demo no matter what instruments they have on board, and if you add some lightweight life detection instruments as well could be truly innovative.
Soaring, Buzzing, Floating, Hopping, Crawling And Inflatable Mars Rovers - Suggestions For UAE Mars Lander
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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