India To Sling Mars Craft Into Sun Orbit

As the fourth planet from Sun and behind Earth, Mars is the second smallest celestial body in the solar system. Named after Roman god of war, it is also known as red planet due to the presence of iron oxide in abundance, giving it a reddish appearance.

Though Earth and Mars have equal period of revolution around their axis, the red planet takes 24 hours and 37 minutes to complete a revolution. Earth takes around 365 days to orbit the sun and Mars 687 days.

"The craft will be injected into the outer space in a trajectory by precisely computing 280 days in advance the position it would achieve near Mars Sep 14, 2014, which will be 500 km above its surface at that time," Rao pointed out.

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) complex at Istrac is also daily conducting checks of the main bus systems, redundant systems, failure detection, reconfiguration and its scientific instruments, including its powerful colour camera.

The camera, which has been activated, has demonstrated its functioning by taking a clear picture of the Indian sub-continent Nov 19 from a distance of 67,975 km with a 3.5 metre resolution.

During the helio sun phase, travelling at a speed of 32.5 km per second mid-course corrections will be carried, if required, Dec 11, mid-April, mid-August and Sept 14.

"The Orbiter will be inserted Sep 24 at 07:14 a.m. into the Martian orbit at 372 km periapsis (nearest to surface) and 80,000 apo-asis (farthest from surface) by firing the engine for nearly 29 minutes in the reverse direction to reduce its speed to 11,009 metres per second by consuming 24 kg fuel," Rao pointed out.

The mission has also built-in mechanism for contingencies and redundancies have been built into the systems and the onboard autonomy to switch over from primary to stand by system.