National Pride-India Ready to Jump in Mars-Launching Time:2.38 p.m. on Tuesday

National Pride-India Ready to Jump in Mars-Launching Time:2.38 p.m. on Tuesday

Mars mission countdown begins

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India 10.18am 05-11-2013

                                                              

--:::GOOD LUCK INDIA:::--

--:::WE ARE READY FOR PRIDE:::--

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  The Hindu PSLV-C25 stands majestically in the Mobile Service Tower at the Satish Dhawan Space Research centre in Sriharikota. Photo: K. Pichumani 
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  AP Technicians inspect the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25) at the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, on Wednesday. India’s Mars orbiter mission is scheduled to be launched by the above vehlcle on Nov. 5.

PSLV-C25 to lift off from Sriharikota at 2.38 p.m. on Tuesday

India’s ambitious mission to Mars moved ahead smoothly on Sunday with the 56.5- hour countdown beginning at 6.08 a.m. at the Sriharikota spaceport. If the countdown progresses without any “hold,” the four-stage Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25) will lift off from the first launch pad at 2.38 p.m. on Tuesday (November 5) and put the 1,350-kg Mars Orbiter in a long, elliptical earth-orbit. That will signal the first step of the spacecraft’s 300-day odyssey to the Red Planet.

“All is well. The countdown is progressing smoothly. Everything is fine,” Director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram S. Ramakrishnan told The Hindu from Sriharikota around 7 p.m. on Sunday.

“We are relaxed,” said M.Y.S. Prasad, Director of Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) at Sriharikota.

Both Mr. Ramakrishnan and Dr. Prasad said separately that the filling of the PSLV-C25’s fourth stage with liquid propellants was completed just minutes ahead of 7 p.m. on Sunday. The second stage would be filled with liquid propellants on Monday. The first and third stage were filled with solid propellants.

K. Radhakrishnan, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said the cost of the Mars mission was about Rs.460 crores. This included building the spacecraft and the ground radar stations and augmenting the capacity of ISRO’s Deep Space Network Station at Byalalu, near Bangalore.

Criticism

Asked about the criticism that a “poor” country like India is wasting money on sending a spacecraft to Mars, Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “We want to tell this country that Mars has a relevance…Science leads to understanding… Some people ask, “Why are you spending Rs.460 crores?” Others will say that Rs.460 crores is only some four rupees per head in this country. Then some others will say it is only the price of an aircraft. So there are different ways of looking at it…We want to tell this country that this is a complex mission.”

M. Annadurai, Programme Director of Indian Remote-sensing Satellites and Small Satellites Systems, ISRO, called the Mars Orbiter Mission “a logical extension of Chandrayaan-1.” “The mission profile is similar to that of the moon mission. The powerful PSLV-XL , which put Chandrayaan-1 into orbit, will swing into action in the Mars mission also.

After the Chandrayaan-1 mission in 2008, ISRO chose to head towards Mars because there are several similarities between the Earth and Mars. They include solid surfaces, seasons, the duration of their day and the polar ice caps. Also, if water exists on Mars, there may be microbial life on the planet.

After India established itself among world leaders in building application-oriented remote-sensing, communication, weather and surveillance satellites, which were “our bread and butter missions,” it was “a natural corollary” that India should turn its attention to science satellites, ISRO scientists said. Hence Chandrayaan-1, the Mars mission, Chandrayaan-2 in 2016, Astrosat for study of cosmic sources and Aditya-1 to study the solar corona. 

Suspenseful 43 minutes

Unlike the previous PSLV missions, which lasted about 18 minutes to put remote sensing satellites into orbit, the flight duration of PSLV-C25 will last a suspenseful 43 minutes before the rocket’s fourth stage puts the spacecraft into orbit. “This is the speciality of the mission,” said B. Jayakumar, Vehicle Director. As Mr. Jayakumar and R. Hutton, Associate Vehicle Director, stood a couple of hundred metres in front of the Mobile Service Tower encasing the four-stage PSLV-C25 on October 30, they asserted that “the PSLV is a rain-proof vehicle.”

Besides the 43-minute flight, yet another missionspeciality is the 25-minute coasting phase between the third stage burn-outand the fourth stage ignition. A third speciality is that it is only 37seconds after the fourth stage burn-out that the spacecraft will be injected into orbit.

V. Seshagiri Rao, Associate Director, SDSC, said several ground stations, including two ship-borne radars in the South Pacific Ocean, would track the vehicle and its positional information would be received every 100 milliseconds. 

Mars Orbiter Mission: Those five minutes are crucial

Mars orbiter spacecraft must be set off between 2.38 p.m. and 2.43 p.m. today

The Mars orbiter spacecraft has just five minutes for getting launched on Tuesday — or it slips into the next day.

It must be set off between 2.38 p.m. and 2.43 p.m.

And the mission has an overall deadline, until November 19, this year. The next best time is not for another 26 months.

“We are on the threshold of a complex mission. If there is a hold during automatic launch sequence there then we will not have it on that day. We can have a maximum of only five minutes. Each day, the launch time advances by 6-9 minutes. We hope that it will make it [on Tuesday],” K. Radhakrishnan, chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) told The Hindu recently.

ISRO scientists, having missed the earlier date of October because a tracking ship reached its watch post near Fiji late, have their calendar laid out for each of the remaining days.

“There is just one opportunity in a day. For each lift-off time, we need to have a new steering programme ready, a new trajectory design, and all this has been done,” he said.

“In earlier missions we worried about only one trajectory and made only a minor change in the steering programme. This total trajectory design is for each lift-off time, which is one big challenge for the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV).”

The flight on the four-stage PSLV-C25 lasts 43 minutes, more than double the time taken for its routine launches which need about 20 minutes, with a long coasting for the last stage.

Mr. Radhakrishnan said now they were concentrating on the launch on Tuesday and then on December 1, when the spacecraft should be put in the trajectory to Mars. Post-lunch, it will be a series of post-midnight exercises for scientists tracking the spacecraft from ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC). On Thursday morning, ISTRAC in Bangalore will start increasing its elliptical orbit in phases by firing its motors six times.

Dr. Radhakrishnan said the first orbit raising exercise was crucial and would happen on Thursday at 1.15 a.m.

The remaining orbit expansions would all be done around 2 a.m. on November 8, 9, 11 and 16, until the spacecraft’s apogee (farthest point from Earth in its elliptical orbit) reaches 1.92 lakh km.

The sixth and last Earth-bound manoeuvre is slated for December 1 at 12.42 a.m.

The trickiest time will be in September 2014, when the spacecraft will be near Mars. The scientists have to slow down the spacecraft and bring it into an elliptical orbit going around Mars.