Mars Orbiter Mission

Mangalyaan(India's 1st Mars Mission) is the country’s first venture into the interplanetary space. ISRO has become the fourth space agency to successfully send a spacecraft to Mars orbit.

Mars Orbiter Mission is India's first interplanetary mission to planet Mars with an orbiter craft designed to orbit Mars in an elliptical orbit.
The Mission is primarily technological mission considering the critical mission operations and stringent requirements on propulsion and other bus systems of spacecraft.

Marking India's first venture into the interplanetary space, MOM will explore and observe Mars surface features, morphology, mineralogy and the Martian atmosphere.

Further, a specific search for methane in the Martian atmosphere will provide information about the possibility or the past existence of life on the planet.

The enormous distances involved in interplanetary missions present a demanding challenge; developing and mastering the technologies essential for these missions will open endless possibilities for space exploration.

After leaving Earth, the Orbiter will have to endure the Interplanetary space for 300 days before Mars capture.

Apart from deep space communications and navigation-guidance-control capabilities, the mission will require autonomy at the spacecraft end to handle contingencies.

Once India decided to go to Mars, ISRO had no time to lose as the nearest launch window was only a few months away and it could not afford to lose the chance, given the next launch would present itself after over 780 days, in 2016.

Thus, mission planning, manufacturing the spacecraft and the launch vehicle and readying the support systems took place swiftly.

PSLV
PSLV is a Fourstage vehicle with alternate Solid and Liquid propulsion stages. The booster stage along with the strap-on motors and the third stage are solid motors while the second and Fourth stages use liquid engines.

PSLV has the capability to launch 1750 kg class satellites into 600 km Sun-Synchronous Polar Orbit (SSPO) and 1425 kg satellites into Sub-Geosynchronous TransFer Orbit (Sub GTO) oF284 km X 21000 km. The vehicle has provision to launch multiple satellites.

PSLV-C25
PSLV-C25, the 25th mission ofPSLV and 5th in the XL conRguration, will carry the Mars Orbiter Satellite (1337 kg) into a 250 km x 23500 km elliptical orbit.

Mars
Mars is a planet/ sphere. It is the fourth planet from the sun. It is the next planet beyond Earth. Mars is more than 142 million miles from the sun.

The planet is about one-sixth the size of Earth. Mars is known as the Red Planet. It gets its red color from the iron in its soil. Mars has two small moons.

Their names are Phobos and Deimos. Mars is very cold. The average temperature on Mars is minus 80 degrees
Mars is rocky with canyons, volcanoes and craters all over it.

Red dust covers almost all of Mars. It has clouds and wind, just as Earth does. Sometimes the wind blows the red dust into a dust storm. Tiny dust storms can look like tornados, and large ones can cover the whole planet!

Mars has about one-third the gravity of Earth. A rock dropped on Mars would fall slower than a rock dropped on Earth. Things weigh less on Mars than they weigh on Earth. A person who weighs 100 pounds on Earth would only weigh about 37 pounds on Mars because of less gravity.

By: T Anand
(The writer is Director, Sadhguru IAS Academy )