New Delhi:
India's mission to Mars, launched last week, is reportedly back on track with an early morning operation by ISRO pushing the spacecraft to a higher velocity as planned. On Monday, the Mars Orbiter Mission or Mangalyaan hit its first hurdle during a fourth repositioning to take it 100,000 kilometres from Earth when the thruster engines briefly failed.
Here are the 10 big developments in this story:
The Indian Space and Research Organisation or ISRO says the satellite is "healthy" and back on track after ISRO's operation to push it higher succeeded early in the morning. (Full Coverage)
ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan had said yesterday there was no hiccup, and deviations will be corrected on November 15 and 30, say officials.(Track LIVE updates here)
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
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.
The satellite will enter the Mars orbit in September 2014.
At its closest point it will be about 200 miles from the planet's surface, and its furthest point will be about 50,000 miles away.
Five solar-powered instruments aboard Mangalyaan will gather data to help determine how Martian weather systems work and what happened to the water that is believed to have once existed on Mars in large quantities.
Mangalyaan will also search Mars for methane, a key chemical in life processes on Earth that could also come from geological processes.
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