Nellore: One of the important tasks for the scientists involved in the Mars mission was to ensure that the Mars Orbiter reached the red planet with minimum fuel. According to a SHAR scientist, the orbital plane constraints of the MoM’s orbit around Earth to spend minimum fuel for its outward trajectory demanded that the fourth stage of PSLV should fire when it was over Australia. But there were no land-based ground stations to track the launch vehicle during this phase and Isro Telemetry, Trac-king, and Command Net-work (ISTRAC) had to deploy two ships west of Australia to track the PSLV on November 5, the date when it was launched in 2013.
The ships took approximately two months to travel from India to their place of deployment and needed clear-cut planning on the launch dates well ahead. However, two contingencies had developed while the ships were on the move. One ship had an electric generator problem, and another had an antenna tracking problem. Engineers of the Isro and Shipping Corporation of India worked excellently to solve the problems.
The Launch Author-isation Board chaired by director of SHAR Centre, Dr M.Y.S. Prasad had to take real-time critical decisions on deployment and positioning of the ships. Finally the ships reached their designated deployment locations in time and tracked the launch vehicle successfully. The net result was to successfully put the MoM in earth’s orbit.
Meanwhile MoM signals first landed in Oz
With Monday’s test of the motor and correction of the orbiter’s trajectory, space scientists are more confident that it would arrive at the precise orbit on Septe-mber 24, said Dr S.K. Shivakumar, director, Isro’s Satellite Centre, Bengaluru, where the orbiter was assembled.
“Today’s operation can be described as the semifinal. The motor functioned as expected and with clock-work precision. Signals from the orbiter were first received at ground stations in Canberra and Byalalu (Indian Deep Space Network), and then transmitted to ISTRAC to confirm that the test was successful,” he added. With a top scientist of Nasa speaking about the possibility of a joint working group on Mars, scientists of both these space agencies are likely to match data beamed by Mangalyaan, Maven and even the rover Curiosity to solve several mysteries about mars and origin of universe.
