BANGALORE, Sept 15: The Scientists at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) here are well poised to place country’s most ambitious Mars Orbiter spacecraft into Martian orbit from Solar orbit on September 24.
Mr V Koteshwar Rao, Scientific Secretary of ISRO said here today, loading of time-tagged commands was completed today. It took 13 hours to load and verify all the commands required for Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI) of the space craft which has completed 98 per cent of its voyage. The commands are required by Mission of Mars (MoM) spacecraft to execute the MOI automatically and it was loaded in a two-day operation yesterday and today.
‘If we succeed to put the satellite on Mars’ orbit by firing the onboard engine on September 24, India will become the first country to send a successful mission to the red planet on debut. So far three other nations (including the European Space Agency)
have had success but not on first attempt,’ he said. Speaking to reporters here today, he said MoM had so far covered a radio distance of 215 million kilometres out of the full distance of 224 million km. When calculated on heliocentric path, the aircraft had covered 653 mn km out of the total distance of 666 mn km.
‘We have learnt by failed missions of the other countries. some failed during launch and others during trans-Mars injection, which we have crossed.
‘We have also exactly calculated the time and distance to Mars and the satellite has moved on dot,’ Dr Rao said. To a question he said ISRO was planning to collaborate with US space agency NASA for a joint Mars working group, but it was still in preliminary stage.
(UNI)
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