Lunatic mission

High on the successful launch of Chandrayan-I, ISRO Chairman Madhavan Nair seems to be on a new, more ambitious mission. He is out to emulate another of America's biggest success stories--Google. Ok, not Google, but Google Earth.

He announced at a convention of Indian cartographers yesterday that ISRO will soon launch a service called 'Bhuvan' (Earth in Sanskrit) which will be better and faster than Google Earth.

His eyes probably glistened with pride when he declared that while Google Earth provides images with resolution of only upto 200 m, "we will provide images upto 10 m resolution". And while Google Earth updates its images every 4 years, we will provide updates every year, he added.

These assertions were dutifully carried in the Indian media the next morning, without anyone so much as doing a Google search to check on these 'facts'.

In fact, Google Earth provides a resolution of anywhere from 15m to 16 cm (o.16m) in some places. Most US maps are of 1 m resolution. In some places, the resolution is deliberately kept lower due to national security and privacy issues. (President APJ Abdul Kalam and ISRO itself objected to some high-resolution images of Indian locations, following which Google reduced their resolution).

Also, all images are current within three years and US images are always kept current.
But who can nudge Mr. Nair into reality when he is in a different orbit. In fact, his enthusiasm seems to have infected a lot of his associates too.

As India's first unmanned mission to moon flew into the main highway to the Earth's satellite, ISRO's director at its tracking center took centrestage. Mr. Shivakumar told the press how it would be inserted into the lunar orbit this Saturday. "Commands are flashed to the spacecraft in the form of digital messages (as if there was another way). The return key in a keyboard is hit and message is processed by the computer and transmitted to the spacecraft. Let me assure that the person who will be hitting this return key on Saturday is under no pressure (not sure why he would be)," he added, his best attempt at scientist humour.

I hope that "the person" knows which keyboard it is and where the "return key" is located. Also, maybe somebody needs to educate these scientists about an invention called the computer mouse.

For all ISRO nerds who seems to have moved into a different, eccentric orbit themselves, it would do well to be reminded that they are only about 40 years behind Mr. Armstrong's giant leap for mankind. And that they need to temper their INSATiable ambitions and at least get the weather data right to begin with just so that some lives could be saved.