Tuesday, November 5– India has launched its first mission to Mars from the Sriharikota spaceport in Andhra Pradesh. The project was completed in 15 months at a cost of $73 million.
Mangalyaan, which means “Mars craft” in Hindi, lifted off at 2:38 pm IST from Sriharikota, 80 kilometres from Chennai using the PSLV-C25 rocket.
The craft will take 11 months to reach the atmosphere of the cold, forbidding planet, traveling 140 million miles from Earth.
Mars Orbiter Mission (Mangalyaan) 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.
No country has been fully successful on its first try. More than half the world’s attempts to reach Mars – 23 out of 40 missions – have failed, including missions by Japan in 1999 and China in 2011.
Five solar-powered instruments aboard Mangalyaan will gather data to help determine how Martian weather systems work and what happened to the water that is believed to have once existed on Mars in large quantities.
Mangalyaan will also search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes.
India becomes only the fourth country or group of countries to reach the Red Planet, after the Soviet Union, United States and Europe.
In 2008-09, the India successfully launched a lunar orbiter, Chandrayaan-1, which discovered evidence of water on the moon. Mangalyaan was developed from technology tested during the Chandrayaan mission.
