The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), maiden inter-planetary project of the Indian space agency, has been declared a success. The spacecraft has entered an orbit around the red planet as planned, marking grand finale of a 10-month treacherous journey into deep space.

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Over the next few days and weeks, scientists will carry out finer corrections in the orbit and also deploy the five payloads the orbiter is carrying. The sensors and cameras on board the orbiter are expected to throw some new light on the Martian atmosphere and its topography. Expectations are particularly high from a payload called Methane Detector. Scientists believe that if we can find signatures of methane on Mars somehow, it will indicate presence of some forms of life. Of course, there can be other indicators of life but methane is considered a certain one. After technology demonstration, now it is going to be the turn of scientific payloads but we will have to wait a little longer for scientific results.The Mars mission has meant a great deal for the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). It has propelled India into a select club of nations with capability of not just launching satellites but also highly complex deep space missions and manage them. It certainly shows that ISRO is maturing into a world-class space agency with technological capability in every segment of the space business though we still need to augment launch vehicle technology before entering the last domain of space endeavour – manned space flights.

In many ways, the Mars mission is different from previous missions. Lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, was the first major scientific mission going beyond earth-rotating satellites. This gave the agency the much-needed confidence that it can soar even higher and it planned its first inter-planetary mission to Mars despite some criticism that such a mission could wait. Given the short window in which an orbiter could be sent to Mars without spending large amounts of fuel, ISRO decided to launch it in November 2013. The next such opportunity would have arrived only in 2016. From approval to launch, MOM made big strides in an incredibly short period of 15 months. This meant getting ready the launch vehicle, designing and fabricating the spacecraft and readying scientific payloads. The project was really fast-tracked and it has gone as scheduled.

This demonstrates that a government agency like ISRO has the capability to execute complex technology project in a very tight deadline and within available resources. The launch vehicle used — PSLV — was indigenous, the satellite was home-grown and all payloads were Indian (unlike Chandrayaan in which several space agencies including NASA had participated through payloads). Executing such a project in a tight time-frame — with no room for failure — requires very high level of project management, team work, review mechanism and quality control. These are fundamentals of high scientific management and this is the unseen strength of ISRO which other scientific agencies, unfortunately lack.

The inherent strength of the space agency comes from its habit of living in the shadow of 'technology denials'. Technology sanctions imposed first after 1974 nuclear blast and then reinforced after the 1998 nuclear testing meant that for most of its productive life ISRO had to live without any foreign technology help. Every bit of technology that goes into satellites and launch vehicles is still considered strategic. This includes systems, sub-systems, microprocessors, software, electronics, materials, propellants and so on. In the 1990s, America prevailed upon Russian agency Glavkosmos not to supply cryogenic technology to India. Finally only cryogenic engines were sold, derailing the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) programme a great deal. Now GSLV with indigenously developed cryogenic engine is well on its way to be a success. All heavier and ambitious future plans of ISRO depend on the success of GSLV.Delivering a high visible and high stake project on schedule is the biggest lesson Indian science can take from the Mars mission. In fact, ISRO needs to transfer this 'technology' and know-how to other scientific agencies in India. We did see similar mission-like approach in Indian science during the 1980s when Rajiv Gandhi conceived and executed the idea of Technology Missions to cater to basic problems of drinking water, immunisation, oilseeds production etc. The mission approach yielded desired results but the missions lost their steam when the government changed and eventually scientific research was re-oriented to make it market-seeking the post-liberalisation period.Sure enough if ISRO can design, develop and send an orbiter to Mars 220 million kilometres away in two years, Indian scientists can design low-cost toilets, develop cheap water purification technologies, execute plans to clean up our rivers in the same amount of time. Can our scientific institutions rise to this challenge? Can our political leadership pose such challenges to the scientific community and prod them to deliver? Simply naming a programme as mission would not help. The approach should be mission-like. Problems need to be articulated clearly and a blueprint defined to solve them with measurable landmarks and deadlines. We will have to borrow know-how from ISRO and deploy the same management techniques for other scientific missions. Hopefully, similar results can be achieved.The writer is a science journalist and author