India’s maiden interplanetary mission passed a critical test on Monday in its low-cost quest to reach Mars. Scientists successfully test fired the main liquid engine of the $75-million Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter for a brief four seconds, just ahead of getting the spacecraft ready to slip into the Martian orbit on Sept 24.
“We have just test-fired the engine for 3.968 seconds and it has served two purposes. We restarted the engine after 300 days and we were able to fire it. It was also a useful trajectory-correction maneuver where we reduced the velocity of the spacecraft by 2.18 meters per second from a speed 22.5 kilometers per second, a small decrement,” V Koteswara Rao, scientific secretary to the space agency Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, told Forbes.
Rao said the exercise was significant as it means that the main liquid engine is available on Sept 24 to propel Mangalyaan into the orbit of Mars. “I can now say that it is highly possible that the orbit injection operation on Sept 24 will be successful,” said Rao.
Through its Mars mission, India aims to enter an exclusive global space club, albeit via low-cost means. The Mars mission is so inexpensive that if it does reach Mars, it will have cost India less than the budget of the hit Hollywood space movie, the $100 million ‘Gravity’. A successful probe is likely to boost India’s position as a purveyor of low-cost space technology and advance its space agency’s global status.
If it does enter the Martian orbit on Wednesday, India will become the first Asian country to do so and join a select group consisting of missions from the American, Russian and European space agencies. India will however have the distinction of becoming the only country to reach the orbit of Mars in its first attempt.
More than half the missions to Mars have failed, either crashing or going off course. China’s Mars mission of 2011 was among the failures.
Indian scientists work on ISRO’s Mangalyaan Mars mission ahead of its November 2013 launch (Image: ISRO)
The Mangalyaan spacecraft is equipped with cameras, atmosphere sensors and surface chemistry equipment that will study the morphology of the Martian surface and investigate the composition of the planet’s atmosphere to study whether it had supported life in the past.
Mangalyaan was launched last November and costs a fraction of NASA’s $671-million Maven Mars mission. NASA’s Maven has already entered the orbit around the planet on Sunday and will move into its final orbit after six weeks of system checks.
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