India's Mars Mission

India became the fifth country (on Nov 05, 2013) to launch Mars mission after Russia, USA, Japan and Europe. It will reach to Mars by Sept-Oct 2014.

The Mars mission launch will mark the PSLV’s silver jubilee. The Orbiter will ride an advanced variant of the rocket, the PSLV-XL – the rocket type that took India to the moon in 2008. Unlike other Mars missions which had a straight flight trajectory, India’s orbiter will first be placed in an elliptical Earth orbit because of the rocket’s weight constraints. The orbiter with its 5 instruments will be lifted through 6 burns of the liquid apogee motor in 25 days, before its transfer to the mars trajectory for a nearly 300-day journey to the planet, the distance between Earth and Mars is 400 million km.

The spacecraft launched would go around the earth for 25 days before the ISRO plans to do trans-Mars injection at 0.42 hours on December 1 enabling it to undertake the long voyage towards the Red planet. Injection has to be precise as it will estimate where the satellite would be on September 24, 2014 — plus or minus 50 kms from the designated orbit around Mars (366 kms X 80,000 kms). As the spacecraft approaches the Martian orbit, ISRO would reduce the velocity so that it’s captured by Martian orbit; otherwise if it continues with the same velocity, it would fly past Mars.

If all goes well the spacecraft will enter the mars orbit on September 21 next year. This critical manoeuvre will be a nerve-wracking exercise for the team at the Indian Deep Space Network at Bayalalu near Bangalore and in the city’s telemetry, tracking and command network because most Mars missions have failed at this stage. Globally the success rate of Mars missions is just 33%. The rocket is being tracked from Biak (Indonesia) and Port Blair.