First of all, there is no prominent region of our solar system that has already not been covered. I know that fly by missions do not send back as much of data as an orbital or landing missions, but still Voyager 1 and 2 pretty much took care of all the planets, and Jupiter and Saturn moons are also visited through several missions.
Sending a mission to Mars by India may not look very value added - as Mars is already pretty well covered through dozens of missions, including the rover missions - but it sends a very strong signal to the rest of the world about the country’s capabilities, especially from defense point of view. When NASA sent a rocket to the moon, its intention was less to learn about the moon, and more to tell USSR (remember that it was a cold war era) that if we can target the moon from 240000 miles away and hit it with pinpoint precision, we can send a nuclear warhead to Kremlin with even greater ease.
India is a nuclear power, and they showed it to the whole world through the famous Smiling Buddha test in 1974, but what good that warhead is if you can’t mount it on a decent rocket and send it on its way to Islamabad or Beijing. So targeted space missions are the next show offs of the nuclear capable countries. It’s a subtle threat, hidden behind a scientific mission.
First of all, range is one thing, and precision is another. Second, from southern most tip of India to northern most tip of China is more than 6500 kilometers, while India’s long range missiles are good for 5000 kilometres only.
In any case, the mars mission is a display of India’s capabilities, and has very little to do with serving scientific community or humanity.
Our solar system and outer planets are largely unexplored. Flyby missions only give you superficial ideas but real deal is to get in physical touch with them.
Venus is as far as mars and only few probes made it to the surface and that too lasted few minutes. ISRO has an opportunity there, far side of mercury, return samples from any celestial object other than moon, drilling the snow sheet of europa, rover on any planet other than mars will be the first, riding a comet, hard landing on sun, tons of moons of outer planets, sending manned mission on any planet etc are few examples of how less we have covered the solar system. Build upon what NASA and other agencies have learned and comeup with something new.
Why not, no law of science forbids it. Find a material which doesnt melt or burn and then make a ship with it and then swaha.
Practically speaking, get an spacecraft with very high melting point and crash it in the sun while another satellite moniters the impact and any ripple created by it. Like what Chandrayaan did on moon, it shot a probe on moon and analysed the impact and the dust kicked up by it.
True that this their is lots and lots of exploration needs to be required within our solar system, though bringing samples back to earth requires a roundtrip, and that is extremely expensive and requires fuel capabilities that we dont have yet. Even Nasa’s manned mission to Mars is right now proposed as a one way trip.
Ok I take it back. It was not Nasa but a privately funded mission. Nasa is not going to do a manned mission anytime soon. But 200,000 people volunteered by last year. Nawaz has a very slim chance to be selected
You dont need manned mission to get samples back on earth. And nothing wrong with one way manned missions, lakhs of soldiers die for their country every year, ek do science ke khatir kaam aa hi sakte hai.
You think it cannot be done? Its not that far fatched of an idea actually.
I did not say manned mission to bring samples back. I said that we dont have that capability (mainly financial, but also technological) to build a round trip from a planet, whether its manned or unmanned. We can build a flyby round trip mission very cost effectively, but one that needs to land and collect sample and then fly back to earth is out of reach for now.
And about the sun, you can do flyby, or orbital, but it has to be outside the 4 million miles from sun. But no, you can not make a matter that could survive sun’s crushing forces. If heat could not kill it, Sun’s high gravitational force would flatten the object in seconds. Sun’s gravity is 28 times more than earth, so an object would crush under its own weight on sun
