Posters for Ekta Kapoor's Mangalyaan Series Do not Show ISRO Rockets – Why It's Important

Bengaluru : Have you seen the GSLV Mk II? It's a beautiful rocket. It is almost 50 m tall, with a clean body, four L40 boosters on the first floor and a cryogenic upper stage. Although the GSLV Mk I is similar, its cryogenic upper stage was powered by a Russian engine. The Mk II is more "made in India" this way, which seems to be of great importance today, with a cryogenic engine made in India at the top.

This is one of the reasons why the new posters of the televised series called MOM – The Women Behind Mangal Mission produced by Ekta Kapoor and distributed by AltBalaji, to the look strange. Published on June 7, a poster shows four women, presumably the protagonists of the show, framing a large rocket in the center that appears to be a Russian Soyuz launcher. Another shows their faces lined up on NASA's rising space shuttle. However, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) launched the Mars Orbiter (MOM) mission in November 2013 with a PSLV rocket in its XL configuration.

Kapoor wrote on his Instagram post: "This show is about the women who sent the [March[to] mission – partly fictional with the sacrosanct nature of the ISRO in mind. This is by far one of the most inspiring stories I have ever heard after millions of meetings with ISRO and some sacrosanct secret that they would like us to preserve. It would be reasonable to badume that after "millions of meetings", Kapoor and his production team knew what the rockets looked like.

Update : At approximately 4:30 pm on June 12, AltBalaji issued a statement in which The Wire said: that the show is a fictional adaptation and that, therefore, it is "legally bound not to use real names or images of people, objects or agencies involved". The note adds that the "advertising material" of the issue was designed taking into account their "contractual obligations".

When asked why the show was then using the official MOM acronym, a spokesman said that he represented "Mission Over Mars". and not "Mars Orbiter Mission" as it was supposed.

GODL License

"Sacrosanct" is a troubling word because there should be no place where public awareness is important. In most other circumstances, and in keeping with its respectful attitude towards public awareness, ISRO is simply not interested in publishing its achievements. That's why MOM has played an important role in more than one way: its launch was the only opportunity for ISRO insiders to participate in any important public engagement – online and offline; a group of space scientists even organized a Q & A session on Reddit.

Moreover, MOM was a technology demonstration mission. her main goal was, and remains, to go into orbit around Mars, which she did in September 2014. So it is curious to know what her builder would like to keep secret, especially as a Civil Space Organization, when its more accessible peers, NASA and the European Space Agency can tell you exactly which technologies should be used to enter orbit around Mars.

However, beyond the badertions of Kapoor's post, there is a larger problem centered on confusion over the rights of reuse of images published by ISRO. For example, US federal law prohibits copyright on all images obtained with NASA's instruments (a stipulation that causes tension in the 2015 film The Martian ). By contrast, India does not have a similar exception to the copyright on government works, which is also free and binding.

Some images that ISRO has uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons library on a Government Open Data License (GODL), published in 2017, with the following explanatory note:

In accordance with the mandate of the policy Government of India's National Data Sharing and Accessibility Framework (NDSAP), which applies to all non-sensitive sharable data available in digital or badogue form, generated with the help of public funds by various government agencies. Indian Government, all users obtain a worldwide, free and non-exclusive license, allowing them to use, adapt, publish (in original or derived form), translate, display, add value and create derivative works (including products and services), for all commercial and non-legal purposes, as well as for the duration of the existence of such rights on the data or infor mation.

NDSAP was advanced in 2012, so there is no ISRO footage in the library from before this year. In addition, Shashank Govindaraju, senior partner at Factum Law in Bengaluru, said the terms of this license elevated the images to the public domain. However, he recognized a difference from a jurisprudential point of view. "Imagine you own a house and let your friend stay there. You still own the house, but you let your friend take a free ride. Similarly, "By retaining the copyright, this allows [the government] to modify the terms of the license.

If the images had been in the public domain On the other hand, AltBalaji or any other producer could have bet on the popularity of the ISRO launchers – and add it in turn – without having to borrow Russian and American albums.

Third, the GODL requires an awkward attribution format that might have been more familiar in the scientific literature:

[Name of Data Provider] [Year of Publication] [Name of Data] [Name of Data Repository/Website] [Version Number and/or Date of Publication (dd/mm)] [DOI / URL / URI]. Published under [Name of License]: [URL of License].

Finally, the number of images available with the GODL license and the protection of NDSAP, at least on Wikimedia Commons, are low. This is understandable to the extent that downloading official images to the library appears to be discretionary; No policy seems to require ISRO to ensure that all its images are available in this manner. A similar qualification is also not visible on ISRO's website, but its "terms of use" are clearly stated:

The copyright of the ISRO elements contained in this website belongs to and remains the exclusive property of ISRO. If a user is interested in the use of the ISRO material presented on this website, then he must obtain permission from ISRO.

One of the consequences of these factors is that ISRO images did not appear everywhere. Internet as are the visuals of NASA's missions. For example, images, GIF files, and NASA videos in the Wikimedia Commons and Flickr Commons libraries are either completely in the public domain, are free of copyright, or are licensed. Creative Commons Attributions (aka CC BY). In fact, many images of Indian missions, including two of the INSAT 1B (here and here), have been attributed to NASA and are completely public domain.

A suitable rocket

it turns out that media media produced by the Russian space agency Roscosmos seem to be limited by restricted access, with many caveats on how these supports can be used. The Japanese Space Agency also provides restricted access, while the European Space Agency is more relaxed, but not totally.

The importance of placing all ISRO images, even if all data are not explicitly in the public domain, is not obvious. be. The counter-argument that this would exacerbate misinformation and misinformation is irretrievably flawed, as the text of the NDSAP confirms. In the absence of access to these resources, and especially clarity about their use / reuse, ISRO products are virtually non-existent.

Leaving aside the need to be "sacrosanct" about anything, said Leslee Lazar, neuroscientist and visual artist, "The MOM show may not have the objective accuracy, but it should have been careful, rockets being the central theme, apart from women. They could easily have used an illustrator to represent the good ISRO rockets. "

In fact, the cover of Gorgeous Women and Their Flying Machines A book published in 2019 by journalist and author Minnie Vaid about women scientists from ISRO, shows her cover. It looks like the Soyuz but is painted like the PSLV, alternating bands of white and deep red. A small line of credit at the end of the book indicates that the photos of Mars on the front and back come from ISRO and that the "satellite" is the work of illustrator R.C. Prakash.

Since a photo of the launch of the PSLV C25 is available on Wikimedia Commons under the GODL license, it is not clear why Speaking Tiger chose to order its own image of a launcher. He did not answer this question by e-mail at the time of publication of this article. This article will be updated as and when it is answered.

On the one hand, we therefore have an organization that, actively or pbadively, blocks the provision of processed and untreated data in the public domain. On the other hand, we seem to have a demand for articles that revolve around these data, but which accompany a strange reluctance (at least so far) to wanting use this data when the opportunity arises. Perhaps more importantly, no group seems to worry – at least not publicly – so should we believe that there is even a problem here?

Note: This article was updated on June 12, 2019 at 4:38. pm to include the clarification of AltBalaji and modified to remove the quote from Prateep Basu.