India Flexes its Interplanetary Muscle with Launch of Mars Probe

Aims to Become a Budget Player in the Global Space Race

SRIHARIKOTA, India – India launched its first ever probe to Mars on Tuesday, seeking to beat China to the red planet and showcase its push for technological development.

Joining the major space powers in the race to develop advanced technologies for future interplanetary flights, The Mars Orbiter Mission probe, dubbed Mangalyaan, lifted off from a launch pad at Sriharikota, a barrier island in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh using a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) C-25 rocket, the Indian Space Research Organization said.

Only the United States, Russia and a team from Europe have been successful in landing space probes on Mars. A similar attempt by the Chinese Space Agency ended in failure in 2011.

Costing 4.5 billion rupees – (or approximately $73 million dollars), the Indian rocket is a fraction of the cost of an average NASA satellite mission. Analysts say India could capture more of the $304 billion global space market with its low-cost technology.

The probe is expected to enter an interplanetary trajectory on November 30 to arrive at a highly elliptical orbit around the Mars on September 24, 2014, approximately at the same time as US space agency NASA’s MAVEN orbiter, the ISRO said.

The main objective of this first Indian mission to Mars is to develop the technologies required for the design, planning, management and operations of an interplanetary mission, ISRO said.

In addition, the probe will explore Mars’ surface features, morphology, mineralogy and the Martian atmosphere using indigenous scientific instruments. The 1.35 ton probe has several different instruments to assist it in its mission to study Martian features, including a methane detector, a mass spectrometer, a color camera, and an infrared camera.

The ISRO had initially planned the launch for October 28. That was postponed to November 5 due to poor weather in the Pacific Ocean that hampered the positioning of ISRO’s tracking ships.

“It will be a significant turning point for our country if we are able to accomplish this,” ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan said in an interview before the launch. “This is a complicated mission but we have the capability to do it.”

The program has to contend with critics who say a country that struggles to feed its people adequately and where more than half have no toilets should not be splurging on space travel.

ISRO counters that its technology has helped economic development through satellites that monitor weather and water resources, or enable communication in remote areas. India has long argued that technology developed in its space program has practical applications to everyday life.

“For a country like India, it’s not a luxury, it’s a necessity,” said Susmita Mohanty, co-founder and chief executive of Earth2Orbit, India’s first private space start-up. She argued that satellites have broad applications from television broadcasting to disaster management.

The Bangalore-based organization and its 16,000 staff also share their rocket technology with the state-run defence body responsible for India’s missile program.

In addition to China, Japan has previously made an unsuccessful attempt to send a probe to Mars.

The Soviet Union launched its Mars exploration program in the 1960s. None of Russia’s 17 attempts to explore the planet were completely successful, however.

The most recent and notable failure for Russia was in 2011 when the Phobos-Grunt probe designed for a return flight to one of the moons of Mars, got stranded in low Earth orbit and fell back to Earth on January 15, 2012.

Source: http://moonandback.com/2013/11/05/india-flexes-its-interplanetary-muscle-with-launch-of-mars-probe/