Days passed, Months passed, people criticised, people admired, ISRO’S little MOM bore a lot, but now, it is getting into serious business. It is just 100 days away to make rendezvous with the red planet.
As mentioned by a foreign ISRO fan, ” ISRO’s MOM has been built at a cost, which is half the budget of the film Gravity”, ISRO has not only won Indian hearts, it has won million of hearts outside India too.
We have written a lot on ISRO’s MOM, we gave a comprehensive coverage on every launch which ISRO did, since Tech-Portal’s launch, and we never fall short of words, for this literally “budget-friendly” space organisation, beating the likes of SpaceX.
Exactly 100 days from today, Mars Orbiter Spacecraft is scheduled for a rendezvous with the red planet. Also, on September 24th, a very critical, and significant technical event is planned, the Mars Orbit insertion. Almost 70% of the journey is complete, and MOM is now 108 million kms away from earth, thus already becoming the farthest spacecraft, ever sent by ISRO.
It takes a signal 6 minutes to reach Earth from MOM. As per ISRO, all the 5 payloads, including the most significant, Methane Gas sensor, are in good health.
The small spacecraft was launched aboard India’s highly trusted PSLV C-25 rocket. India drew equal appreciation and criticism for the mission. Scientific community appreciated India’s effort of launching such a complex mission aboard a rocket, which is meant for earth missions. ISRO used the slingshot method to throw Mangalyaan into space.
Although being an extremely cheap mission, considering costs which are incurred by NASA for such missions, India still drew criticism for spending such an amount (approx $66 million) on a space mission, when almost half of the country still lives under poverty.
Overall, the project was much appreciated due to the highly complex antennas and space technologies, developed by India in such a short span of time. If successful, India would become the first Asian country to successfully send a mission to planet Mars.
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Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) scientists, on Sunday, started the two-day exercise of sending commands to the spacecraft. The MOM will store and execute them on September 24 by firing its liquid apogee motor to remain on an elliptical Martian orbit from where it would study the atmosphere and morphology of the red planet for at least six months. The ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan says, “It’s a challenging job”, adding, “And phenomenally exciting.”