Also planned is a mission to the Moon.
By Rajiv Theodore
NEW DELHI: India is a land of paradoxes, at once amusing and depressing. The contradictions are glaring — abject poverty and crass opulence; decaying slums and 7-star hotels; malnourished children and wasted food; of a culture offering deep spiritualism on one hand and abounding with cruelty to women on the other, of bullock–carts to bullet-trains to even space travel.
And now, the country is getting ready for an ambitious project – a mission to Mars.
India is poised just four days away from a launch of a mission to the red plant—Mars, for hunting Methane, the ‘precursor chemical’ for life.
A countdown has begun for the take-off on November 5 onboard PSLV-C25, from Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota, 90 km. from Chennai. The countdown starts at 1800 hours this Sunday.
The Bangalore-headquartered Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is bristling with action as it plans to undertake a launch rehearsal on Thursday.
Executed at a cost of Rs. 450 crore — the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) will utilize Rs. 110 crore for the launch pad PSLV-C25 that would launch the Rs. 150 crore spacecraft. The remaining amount is spent on augmenting ground segment, including those required for deep space communication.
Once launched, the spacecraft would go around the earth for about 25 days before embarking on November 30 on a more than 300-day long voyage to Martian orbit. It’s scheduled to reach on September 2014. The minimum life of the spacecraft around Mars is estimated to be six months, but it would certainly outlive that, as similar satellites orbited by other countries have sometimes lasted six-seven years, ISRO officials said.
The primary objectives of the mission are to demonstrate India’s technological capability to send a satellite to orbit around Mars and conduct meaningful experiments, such as looking for signs of life, take pictures of the red planet and study Martian environment. The satellite will carry compact science experiment instruments, totaling a mass of 15 kg. There will be five instruments to study Martian surface, atmosphere and mineralogy.
After leaving the earth’s orbit, the spacecraft will cruise in deep space for about 10 months using its own propulsion system and will reach Martian transfer trajectory in September 2014. The spacecraft subsequently is planned to enter into a 372 km. by 80,000 km. elliptical orbit around Mars.
India has also plans to further examine the Moon and carry out missions to comets and asteroids during the next decade. An earlier mission in September 2008 was an orbiter mission on the Moon. The second attempt would be to try landing on the lunar surface.
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