Bangalore: India is all set to reach new zenith in its space mission
with country's spacecraft entering the final stage of Mars mission and all set
to enter red planet on September 24.
The spacecraft has covered 98 per
cent of its 300-day odyssey and the critical manoeuvre would be performed when
the scientists restart the onboard liquid engine which is in sleep mode for
nearly 10 months.
The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM),
India’s first interplanetary mission, was launched on November 5, 2013 by
India’s workhorse Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle(PSLV) from the spaceport of
Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh.
At a media briefing, ISRO said on
Monday it was confident about the MOM’s success going by its performance so
far.
Commands for inserting the Mars
spacecraft into the Red Planet’s orbit were being uploaded since yesterday and
were expected to be completed today, it said.
“The remaining crucial thing is Mars
Orbit Insertion, and if you see some missions have failed because of failures
in estimates in the distance from the mars, and if you see the history they
were at very early stages....,” ISRO Scientific Secretary V Koteswara Rao said.
“We are very confident; there is no
reason, not to be confident going by the performance of the system so far. We
have covered 98 per cent of the journey and another 2 per cent we are going to
complete soon. We are very confident, teams are all very confident,” he said.
If the Rs 450 crore MOM mission
turns out to be a success, ISRO would be the fourth space agency in the world
to have sent a mission to Mars.
European Space Agency (ESA) of
European consortium, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of
the US and Roscosmos of Russia are the only three agencies which have so far
sent their missions to the red planet.
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