Times of India
BEIJING, Nov 2: India's Chandrayaan mission may have evoked a good bit of national pride and come in for praise from different quarters worldwide including
the White House in Washington. But a large section of the Chinese media has raised questions published articles questioning the success of Chandrayaan.
The articles question the contention of Indian Space Research Organisation, which said that Chandrayaan had an apogee of 37,800km with an orbital period of 73 hours. The articles in the Chinese media state that the apogee was only around 16,400 km with an orbital tour of 11 hours.
Most of the articles have been published in websites and blogs popular with the military and nationalist politicians. They include bulletin boards of websites that are linked to government organizations. But the general newspapers have refrained from taking a critical view of the Indian space mission. Most of them are copies of a single article.
The critical articles claim they were the result of analysis of data released by www.n2yo.com, which is a site devoted real time tracking of satellite launched across the world and contains a lot of technical information. Interestingly, the website of US government's National Aeronautics and Space Administration has published an article on Chandrayaan without raising any doubts about it.
Most of the articles are copies of a single piece using almost similar text. The headline common several of the pieces in different websites are: "Orbit not very normal; has India's Chandrayaan-1 run into problem?"
A search on the Chinese search engine, Baidu and the Chinese version of Google throws up several websites where the same article has been pasted. It seems someone or some agency has gone into a good deal of effort to ensure that the article is widely circulated across several media networks including those that represent government agencies.
Some of the Chinese sites also published Chinese versions of another English article, which described Chandrayaan mission as a case of major success in a country that has not been able to curb human rights violations and address the problem of poverty adequately. The source of this second article has not been clarified.
"Though India's human rights performance has been dismal in the last decade with right wing Hindu chauvinists targeting two large minorities of the country, Christians and Muslims but it has not hindered India's ascendance to the big league in the space," the version in the Chinese media said.