Friday, November 14, 2008

Chandrayaan - making us proud !

It is truly a red letter day in India's history. We've become the fourth nation to drop our flag on the lunar surface. Chandrayaan has made each one of us proud. We now join one of the very few countries in the world to have demonstrated the capability to carry out space missions. This is a very good answer to all the cynics who say, "If it is made in India, then it'll surely break down". As Madhavan Nair put it, there are not many countries who've been this successful in their first attempt. And the most important thing is that we've done it with one of the smallest budgets.

Our scientists are truly amazing to have carried out such an enormous task with a very high degree of precision. This is truly a moment for each one of us to be proud of being an Indian. I only hope that we replicate this achievement in every other field.

Kudos to the Chandaryaan team for making us proud with this successful mission !!! Kudos to all the scientists and workers of ISRO !!! We salute your achievements and wish you success in each one of your future endeavours !!!


I sincerely hope that the probe functions with the same precision seen so far, for the rest of its lifetime. Plans are already on for Chandrayaan-2 and talks are circulating about a possible mission to Mars or Venus.While it is nice to dream of such things, we should not get carried away by our initial success. We should take one step forward at a time, with great care and planning.

ISRO's mission have made significant contributions to our economy and provide tons of data that have significantly boosted weather prediction models, agricultural practices, remote sensing, mapping terrains, communications, entertainment etc. In my opinion, following an indigenous space programme is one of the best decisions taken by our governments.

Having said all this, I also find ISRO's home page to be really pathetic. It is very informative, but it is no way appealing, especially for such a high-tech institution as ISRO. On top of that, we're the outsourcing capital of the world with an IT company in every nook and corner, any of whom would do a very good job of designing the site. The site looks like a collection of HTML pages designed as a school project.There is a link, "Suggestions for website" on the main page which then opens the "mail compose" page to send a mail to the webmaster. I'm planning to send in some of my suggestions :). Such a world class institution deserves a world class brand and site.

ISRO Homepage:
http://www.isro.gov.in

1 comments:

Kartik said...

Know wat.. i was just thinking yest abt writing something abt chandrayan and helium-3, touted as the fuel for the future. Indeed this is a real commendable effort by ISRO da. Did you know that there were two tamil guys annadurai(project director) and one more.. (i don remember his name), involved in this effort. This should make us a little more proud. The race for helium-3 is really on now. Lets wait and watch.