Bangalore/Chennai: India’s maiden spacecraft to Mars is ready to part with earth an hour after midnight and get into the sun’s orbit for its long voyage to the red planet, space agency officials said yesterday.
“The Mars Orbiter is ready for the crucial slingshot after midnight when its liquid engine will be fired at 12.49am today to leave the earth orbit and enter the solar orbit after 23 minutes at 1.12am,” a senior space agency scientist said.
About 200 scientists and technicians are glued to the control panels in the Mars mission complex at the Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (Istrac) of Indian Space Research Organsiation (ISRO) here, monitoring the Orbiter in its last lap of the earth’s orbit at an apogee (farthest from equator) of 192,915km.
“Performance assessment of all subsystems of the spacecraft has been completed. The Orbiter is ready for the trans-Mars injection, which will make it escape the earth’s sphere of influence (gravitational pull) and leap into the sun orbit in a trajectory to traverse 680 million km during the nearly 10-month voyage and reach the Martian orbit on September 24, 2014,” ISRO scientific officer V Koteshwar Rao said.
Transition from the earth’s final orbit to solar orbit has been programmed in line with sun’s gravity and laws of the universe to ensure Orbiter reaches precisely on time to sling into the Martian orbit after 280 days.
IANS
