India’s Mars Mission hits first hurdle

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 New Delhi, Nov 11, 2013:  India’s mission to Mars, launched last week, has hit its first problem. Last night, the satellite was not able to raise its orbit to the required 100,000 km.

The Indian Space and Research Organisation or ISRO says the satellite is "healthy" and another attempt to push it higher will be held early tomorrow morning.

Instead of flying directly to Mars, the 1350-kg vehicle is scheduled to orbit Earth for nearly a month, building up the speed to "slingshot" its way out of the earth’s gravitational pull to embark on its 780-million-kilometre journey.

ISRO staged a flawless launch last Tuesday of its Mars-bound spacecraft, loaded with a camera, an imaging spectrometer and a methane sensor to probe for life on the Red Planet.

ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan told NDTV today, "The space craft is healthy and it encountered a problem when a specific redundancy test was being conducted and it failed to reach the desired velocity it was to achieve." A failure analysis committee will examine why this problem happened, he said, but added that crucially, not much fuel was wasted in the failed attempt.

The 450-crore mission to Mars, India’s first attempt at inter-planetary travel, has made international headlines, at least in part for its cost-efficiency. Its US counterpart, NASA’s Maven, due to launch November 18 will cost 10 times as much.

The Mars Orbiter Mission, known as "Mangalyaan", must travel more than 200 million kilometres over 300 days to reach an orbit around the Red Planet next September.

 

Mars mission safe, says ISRO Chief


’’The spacecraft is in normal health. There is no concern at all. There is no problem at all in the system. Mars mission is 100 per cent safe’’, an ISRO spokesperson. PTI photo of ISRO Chairman Radhakrishnan.

Indian Space Research Organisation today failed to fully meet the objective of the fourth orbit-raising operation conducted on Mars Orbiter Spacecraft as flow to the liquid engine stopped, but allayed apprehensions over the ambitious venture to the Red Planet.

This manoeuvre planned to raise the apogee (farthest point to Earth) from 71,623 km to one lakh km but could only achieve 78,276 km on the back of an incremental velocity of 35 metres/second as against originally planned 130 metres/second.

"The spacecraft is in normal health. There is no concern at all. There is no problem at all in the system. Mars mission is 100 per cent safe", an ISRO spokesperson told PTI here, after the below-par operation raised an alarm in some quarters.

Bangalore-headquartered ISRO has now planned a supplementary orbit-raising operation tomorrow at 0500 hrs IST to raise the apogee to nearly one lakh km.

During the fourth orbit-raising operations, the redundancies built-in for the propulsion system were exercised -- energising the primary and redundant coils of the solenoid flow control valve of 440 Newton Liquid Engine, and logic for thrust augmentation by the attitude control thrusters, when needed.

"However, when both primary and redundant coils were energised together, as one of the planned modes, the flow to the Liquid Engine stopped.The thrust level augmentation logic, as expected, came in and the operation continued using the attitude control thrusters.This sequence resulted in reduction of the incremental velocity", ISRO said.

"While this parallel mode of operating the two coils is not possible for subsequent operations, they could be operated independently in sequence", according to the space agency.

During the orbit-raising operations conducted since November seven, ISRO has been testing and exercising the autonomy functions progressively, that are essential for Trans-Mars Injection (TMI) and Mars Orbit Insertion (MOI).

During the first three orbit-raising operations, the prime and redundant chains of gyros, accelerometers, 22 Newton attitude control thrusters, attitude and orbit control electronics as well as the associated logics for their fault detection isolation, and reconfiguration have been exercised successfully, ISRO said.

"The prime and redundant star sensors have been functioning satisfactorily. The primary coil of the solenoid flow control valve was used successfully for the first three orbit-raising operations", it added.