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Mangalyaan to reach Mars orbit next week

‘Spacecraft has completed 95 per cent of its heliocentric journey towards Mars’

BENGALURU: It will be a nerve-racking dawn for Indian space scientists on September 24 as they stay glued to an array of mission computers with their hearts in the mouth for positioning a probe capsule close to Mars’ and catapult them to a new league.

On Monday, the Isro scentists started beaming commands so that a motor onboard kicks into life at the designated hour to nudge the probe into an orbit 423 km from Mars (224 million km from the earth) on D-day.

The effect of these commands, beamed from the Mission Control Center at ISRO’s Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) station in Bengaluru, will be known during a dry run scheduled for September 22 when the motor, cold and unutilized for almost 300 days, will be activated for a couple of seconds.

“We are very confident. There is no reason not to be confident going by the performance of the system so far. We have covered 98 per cent of the journey, and are going to complete another two per cent soon,” V. Koteswara Rao, scientific secretary, Isro, said.

Mr. Rao said if the probe zooms into its designated orbit around Mars without a glitch on September 24, India would be the first country to position an orbiter around the Red Planet in the first attempt, the first Asian nat-ion to reach that planet, and the fourth agency to accomplish such a complex mission.

He said the first signals of the probe arriving at the slot would reach ground stations a few minutes after 8 am on September 24, with the first picture likely to be received that night.

( Source : dc correspondent )
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