Scientists broke into wild cheers as the orbiter's engines completed 24 minutes of burn time and maneuvered into its designated place around the red planet.
The success of India's Mars Orbiter Mission, affectionately nicknamed MOM, brings India into an elite club of Martian explorers that includes United States, the European Space Agency and the former Soviet Union.
"Today Mars has met MOM. MOM never disappoints. History has been created today," Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced amid applause at the Indian Space Research Organisation command center in Bangalore."We have gone beyond the boundaries of human enterprise and innovation."
"We have navigated our craft through a route known to very few," Modi said, congratulating both the scientists and "all my fellow Indians on this historic occasion."
The Indian Space and Research Organisation described the mission as flawless.
The success marks a milestone for the space program in demonstrating that it can conduct complex missions and act as a global launch pad for commercial, navigational and research satellites.
It's also a major feat for the developing country of 1.2 billion people, most of whom are poor. At the same time, India has a robust scientific and technical educational system that has produced millions of software programmers, engineers and doctors, catapulting many into the middle class.
More than half the world's previous attempts — 23 out of 41 missions — have failed, including one by Japan in 1999. The United States had its first success with a 1964 flyby by a spacecraft called Mariner 4, returning 21 images of the surface of the planet. The former Soviet Union reached the planet in 1971, and the European Space Agency in 2003.
India was particularly proud that MOM, a 1,350-kilogram (nearly 3,000-pound) satellite, was developed with homegrown technology and for a bargain price of about $75 million. NASA's much larger Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission, or Maven, which reached its position around the red planet on Sunday, cost nearly 10 times as much at $671 million.
- MOM will now circle the planet for at least six months on an elliptical path that gets within 365 kilometers (227 miles) of the planet's surface at its closest and 80,000 kilometers (49,700 miles) at its farthest.
None of the instruments will send back enough data to answer these questions definitively, but experts say the data will help them better understand how planets form, what conditions might make life possible and where else in the universe it might exist.
- There are three more satellites already circling the planet — NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, and the ESA's Mars Express. On the Martian surface, NASA's Curiosity and Opportunity rovers are rolling across rocky terrain.
AP
haaretz.com
24/9/14
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Related:
India's Mars mission will last for many years as it has so far not experienced any failures, a top space official has reportedly said....
ReplyDelete"Mars (mission) is expected to last for many years now because it has gone through solar conjunction also; so we don't see much of a problem," A.S. Kiran Kumar, chief of the state-owned Indian Space Research Organisation, told the media in the southern city of Bengaluru Monday.
He added, "We had planned it only for six months. Then we were not expecting so much fuel to remain after we completed our insertion activity. There is still a lot of fuel, all other subsystems are working fine and so far we have not had any failures."
India successfully launched its maiden mission to Mars on November 5, 2013, and the low-cost spacecraft was put into orbit around the red planet on its very first attempt on September 24, 2014.
http://www.china.org.cn/world/2015-09/22/content_36651821.htm
22/9/15