[BangPypers] Congratulations to India for Landing on the Moon!

[Anand Balachandran Pillai]

On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 4:59 AM, Deepak Thukral <iapain at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> A job well done!
>> (It is unknown whether Python was running onboard ;-)
>
> ISRO is in stone age as far as Computer Technology is concern (Their portal only works in IE6 and written in creepy html). I think they are toiling with C, Fortran & JAVA. Probably they should inherit Python/Erlang from NASA/ESA. Hoping their new GIS Keyhole like webapp will use Python.
>

Don't confuse the lack of sophistication of their website with any lack of
sophistication in engineering. Space & rocket science/engineering is a much more
complex and delicate affair than typical software engineering. ISRO develops
and uses complex software for mission control which is not exactly
akin to developing a website - it is much more difficult to get right.

Even if your website crashes, perhaps you might loose data or a few visitors
and lose some uptime. However, this is not the case with the software used
in space science. Everything has to work and work perfectly. Remember that
simple software glitches have often caused entire rocket missions to be aborted.
This has happened even for mighty NASA. The most recent one I can think of
is the glitch with VxWorks that happened in one of their Mars rovers
which caused
the system software to reboot itself many times.

In fact ISRO has done a splendid job managing to put a satellite to Moon
orbit and also perform a moon impact all in the very first attempt. Recall that
Russia and U.S.A have had several crash lands and aborted attempts in their
moon missions. The quality control at ISRO has to be pretty damn good.

I read a few articles about the images from Chandrayaan and it seems the
camera they have is top-class. The images it has send are already pretty good,
and it is perhaps the first moon satellite to carry a 3D (Terrain
mapping) camera.
I don't think any single moon (or perhaps earth) satellite is a classic example
of international co-operation. Chandrayaan carries 11 payloads.

To me, it looks like India is leading the way in international space
co-operation.
ISRO needs a big pat on the back for what they have done.

> Deepak
>
>
>
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-- 
-Anand