ISRO Working On India's First Mission To Mars - Mangalyaan

Scientists & engineers at Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have been working on the the Mars Orbiter Mission aka MOM for several months now and it's expected that the 'Mangalyaan' will take off for the red planet by November 2013. The mission is basically a technology demonstrator aimed at developing technologies required for the planning, design, operations and management of interplanetary mission. NASA is joining hands with ISRO for the Rs. 450 crore project to provide deep space navigation tracking support during the mission throughout the non-visible period of the Indian Deep Space Network.

The decision of collaboration was stamped at the fourth meeting of Indo-US joint working group on civil space co-ooperation at Washington on March 21. The minutes of the meeting were made public just two days ago through a fact sheet. NASA will offer support to the Mangalyaan mission from its facilities located at Goldstone in the United States, Madrid in Spain and Canberra in Australia.


NASA's Charles Bolden recently addressed ISRO team all over India from ISRO's Ahmedabad based Space Applications Centre. NASA's interest in the partnership lies in the analysis of the data from the Methan Sensor for Mars - which will be one of the five instruments on board of the Mars Orbiter India has planned.

The Mangalyaan will take off from ISRO's launch site at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh using a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket, making it India's first ever mission to the Mars. It will carry a payload of 15 Kg with 5 instruments viz. Methan Sensor For Mars (MSM), Mars Color Camera (MCC), Mars Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyzer (MENCA), TIR Spectrometer (TIS) and Lyman-Alpha Photometer (LAP).

The project was approved by the Government Of India last year on August 3. We're of course following the developments closely to bring the latest updates from the miss to you. Stay tuned for more!