The Run To The Red Planet

If all goes well, the first Indian inter-planetary spacecraft will create history on September 24 by sliding into the Martian orbit. Indian jugaad made it possible when 500 Indian scientists launched it in a record time of 15 months, and not having powerful rocket-launchers, acquired the required velocity by forcing the spacecraft to orbit the earth for nearly a month.

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Why Man Wants To Go To Mars

• Moon (which has no air and where temperature hovers around 123 celsius during the day) and Venus (which has acid rain and temperature around 460 degree Celsius)  not deemed habitable.
• Mars has water in its soil, the day-night rhythm is closest to earth and it has a thin atmosphere to protect from the Sun’s radiation. The specific gravity on Mars is deemed manageable.
• “Mankind will colonise Mars in less than a 1,000 years.” U.R. Rao, chairman, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad
• 12,756 km Earth diameter, 6,779 km Mars diameter
• 24.37 hrs Length of the day on Mars
• -62oc Average temperature on Mars
• 0.13% Oxygen in Mars atmosphere

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Why ISRO’s Mars Mission Is Big

2030 is the year NASA hopes to land the first astronaut on Mars

• 51 attempts made to reach the planet
• 30 of them failed
• 3 space agencies successful so far

The only maiden attempt to succeed was by European Space Agency

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Waste Of Money Or A Worthy Cause?

• The Indian space programme has primarily been focused on meteorological, communication and military needs.
• US $1 billion ISRO’s annual budget, 0.38 per cent of GDP compared to US $17-18 billion spent every year by NASA on research and programmes
• US $304 billion Estimated share of global space market
• The Economist wrote an editorial questioning a developing country like India splurging scarce resources on expensive space programmes. Some Indian scientists are also critical about the ‘meaningless’ Mars mission. But ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) and its commercial arm, Antrix, defend the programme and believe the low-cost capability of India to launch and control spacecrafts would help India grab a share of the global space market, estimated to be worth US $304 billion.

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What Can Go Wrong Now

• On September 24, Indian scientists will have to reduce the speed of Mangalyan from 22 km to just 1.6 km a second to enable entry into the orbit of Mars.
• To do so, scientists will have to fire an engine back to life, an engine that would have been lying idle for 299 days. Both are complicated manoeuvres.
• If it is successfully placed into Mars’ orbit, the next challenge of Mangalyan will be when a comet flies very close past the red planet in October

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How ISRO’s Mars Mission Compares With NASA’s

• NASA has been launching Mars missions for nearly 50 years
• NASA’s last mission is called MAVEN, short for Mars Atmosphere & Volatile Evaluation
• MAVEN took five years to build; carries more sophisticated equipment than Mangalyan
• MAVEN cost six times ($670 million) as much as Mangalyan ($72 million)
• The cost difference is partly due to relatively lower salaries of scientists and engineers in India

Graphic: Rahul Awasthi Text: Uttam Sengupta