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Countdown for India’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) ‘Mangalyan’ to start on Sunday as the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) gears up for the country’s first inter-planetary venture. It may be noted this will be the cost effective mission to the Red Plant and it would create a new history of Mars exploration.
If the launch is successful, which ISRO officials are confident about, it will not only create history in India's around 50-year-old space programme, but also put the country in the global map as globally the success rate of Mars mission is just 33 per cent.
Two days after Diwali, ISRO is planning to ignite its giant 45-meter rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota, located at 108 kms on the North West of Chennai, for its over 200 million kilometre journey on its trans-Martian orbit.
The launch of the Mars Orbiter spacecraft is scheduled on November 5, 2013 at 2:36 pm IST onboard the PSLV-C25. It’s going to be a 56-hours-plus countdown, which commences at 6 am on Sunday.
The launch window is open till November 19, 2013. If the launch does not happen for some reason this time, then the next opportunity will be January 2016 and then in 2018.
The main objective of the launch is to check whether Mars ever had an environment in which life evolved and to explore Mars' surface, topography, minerology and atmosphere.
India will be the fifth country to sent orbit to Mars, after Russia, US, Japan, Europe and China.
ISRO is planning to undertake a launch rehearsal on Thursday and officials have said that almost all the steps to be carried out during the countdown were checked during the rehearsal, they also expressed their satisfaction the progress.
ISRO's Chairman K Radhakrishnan was quoted saying “we have only five minutes launch window and the mission readiness review is slated for November 1, following which the launch authorisation board would give its green signal for the odyssey.”
The space craft is expected to reach Martian orbit by September 2014 and ISRO officials says though the minimum life of the spacecraft around Mars is six months it could certainly outlive it, noting that similar satellites orbited by other countries have sometimes lasted six-seven years.
It may be noted, in the case of INSAT class of satellites and Chandrayaan-1, they reached orbital slots in one and two weeks, respectively, besides in Chandrayaan-1,ISRO had to deal with a distance of about four lakh km, while in the case of Mars it’s 4,000 lakh km.
It is a Rs 450 crore mission, including Rs 110 crore for building PSLV-C25 that would launch the Rs 150 crore spacecraft, while the balance spent on augmenting ground facilities, including those required for deep space communication.
The Mars satellite, which would be launched on board Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-XL), will carry compact science experiments, totalling a mass of 15 kg. There will be five instruments to study Martian surface, atmosphere and mineralogy.
According to reports this will be cost effective or cheapest as compared to NASA, the European Space Agency, Japan and China, who have spent millions of Dollars to Mars.
ISRO officials attributed the cost difference mainly due to indigenisation.
Journey to destination Mars: A timeline
- August 2010: ISRO forms a team headed by V Adimurthy to study mission feasibility and gets go-ahead for the project
- August 2012: In his Independence Day address, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announces Mars Mission
- August 2013: Assembly of PSLV begins at Sriharikota for the original scheduled launch on October 28
- October 22: ISRO announces postponing the launch to November 5, was postponed due to bad weather in the Pacific Ocean.
The two ships SCI Yamuna and Nalanda, which were delayed due to bad weather, have also reached their destination in the Pacific, which 1,000 nautical miles eastwards of Fiji Islands. The two Indian ships will monitor the health of the rocket and satellite as it sails over the ocean after it launched.
