MOON VILLAGE

A race against time is currently on to establish the Deep Space Network Campus and the Science Data Centre at the site. Work must be completed by at least early February for the moon mission to be on schedule. When completed the Rs 100 crore project will be the nerve centre for all future Indian deep space missions— Chandrayaan 2 in the near future and maybe Mars soon after. The choice of idyllic Byalalu as the site of this high technology venture has been the security offered from the sounds and lights of Bangalore by the saucer shaped basin that village nestles in, says S K Shivakumar, director of the Deep Space Network venture and the ISRO telemetry, tracking and control network unit. Only the noise of a generator supplying power for the construction activity on the campus bounces off the hills forming the rim of this basin and tempers Byalalu’s stillness. ‘‘We have until now been using antennae of 10 to 12 metre sizes for tracking the remote sensing satellites that are earth bound. For the moon that is 3,84,000 km way only a 32-metre antenna can capture every signal from the satellite,’’ says Shivakumar.

‘‘Byalalu has been chosen since we felt that it is one of the best locations to contain electromagnetic noise that would otherwise interfere with signals from deep space. We also felt that the growth of Bangalore would not touch Byalalu very soon,’’ he adds. Though the Indian deep space network facility at Byalalu seems to have caught the fancy of even the distant Chinese—according to one of the security guards at the campus he once caught a Chinese national trying to take pictures—the residents of Byalalu themselves are hardly enthused by the happenings in their backyard. ‘‘We don’t know what they are doing here. It is some government thing I know. In the village they say that this will help the government know everything about who is fighting with whom in Bangalore or anywhere,’’ says the 40-year-old Padma.

She says she is just glad she is being allowed to graze her cows and gather firewood on the campus after a break of nearly a month. The arrival of the Deep Space Network has changed her village, she said. ‘‘I won’t be surprised if Byalalu becomes another Bangalore soon. Look at the houses people are building,’’ she says. Once a village filled with old, low roofed, typically rustic homes, Byalalu is now peppered with single and double storey houses painted in bright oranges, greens and yellows. A fancy hotel and resort set up in the Byalalu limits by high-profile Kannada film super star Upendra has, in fact, attracted more attention of the locals than ISRO’s large dish antennae. The real estate boom from Bangalore has started having its effects. Land prices that stood at around Rs 5.5 lakh an acre a few years ago are now touching around Rs 50 lakh an acre, says Rudresh Gowda a local large land holder. He calls the Deep Space Network facility an ISRO factory and says he is hoping locals will get some employment. ‘‘When I surrendered my one acre of land for ISRO, I received four and half lakh rupees as compensation. Today the land prices have gone up ten times,’’ says Kumbaiah, a 57-year-old cattle herd who now fears even a house he has abutting the campus will go.

‘‘It is the heartburn from the knowledge of the new prices for their lands that has made people disinterested in knowing or understanding the ISRO project,’’ a teacher at the government local primary school Jagdish Kumar said. ‘‘As far as I know it is a space research facility of ISRO,’’ he said. Like several others in the village, children at the school when asked what they thought the giant antennae were doing in their backyard shouted ‘‘it is a government factory.’’

While factory is the standard term being used to describe the facility that is expected to house 25-30 people on a permanent basis, one resident of the village, Sharadamma, described it as a facility that will track the path of an aircraft through the skies. Guess, they will all soon realise they have become a part of moon gazers.

-Johnson TA