Indian scientists on Monday successfully tested the main engine of a spacecraft bound for Mars and performed a course correction that puts the low-cost project on track to enter the Red Planet’s orbit.
The US$74 million mission was to attempt to enter orbit around Mars early today. If successful, it would become the first time a mission has entered Mars’ orbit on its first attempt, enhancing India’s position in the global space race.
“Main liquid engine test-firing successful... We had a perfect burn for four seconds as programmed,” the state-run Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said on its social media sites.
The engine was tested after being idle for 300 days and was to be used with eight small thrusters during orbit entry. Reducing the craft’s speed from its current rate of 22km per second would be a key challenge, experts say.
The spacecraft, called Mangalyaan, was launched in November last year.
The project has been embraced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who aims to establish India as a bigger player in the more than US$300 billion space technology market, even as regional rival China gives stiff competition with its bigger launchers.
Modi was to sit next to scientists at ISRO’s command center in Bangalore today during the orbital insertion phase of the mission, the space agency’s scientific secretary V. Koteswara Rao told reporters.
Rao said that a group of about 100 scientists celebrated when the communication signals from the craft, which take 12 minutes to reach Earth, showed the engine test was successful.
“It was a joyous moment,” Rao said.
Success would make India the fourth space power after the US, Europe and Russia to orbit or land on the Red Planet.
“This was a critical test we had to overcome. The mission appears to be near successful now,” said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, an expert on space security at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank.
The Mangalyaan aims to study Mars’ surface and mineral composition and scan its atmosphere for methane, a chemical strongly tied to life on Earth. It cost about one-tenth of NASA’s Mars mission Maven, which successfully entered Mars orbit on Sunday.
Indians are praying for the mission’s success. On Sunday, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate group of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, offered ritual prayers in New Delhi.
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