Indian-led firms bring Mars to Earth
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 15 January 2004, 20:30 IST   |    1 Comments
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WASHINGTON : Scientists and engineers of Indian origin are playing a frontline role in the Mars Spirit rover mission, reports an Indian daily. It turns out that Indian companies are handling the back-end of the project too – bringing back to earth images of Mars and enabling their worldwide dissemination – through their ubiquitous presence in the Internet and dot com business. Two Indian-led Silicon Valley firms, eTouch and Speedera Networks, are key contractors in the project that has brought back spectacular Mars images live to millions of space-struck earthlings. Founded by Mumbai IIT-ian Aniruddha Gadre, eTouch operates the NASA portal, www.nasa.gov, after winning a $ 6 million government contract last year. Speedera Networks, founded by IIT-Rourkee alumnus Ajit Gupta, enables the images to be disseminated worldwide with its network of contact points across the globe. Their performance has been outstanding, NASA officials say. In just six hours after the latest Mars landing, NASA’s homepage received 916 million hits, and users downloaded 154 million web pages. In comparison, the portal received 2.8 billion hits for all of 2003. (Source: Economic Times)

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