ISRO engineers put together the Mars Orbiter Mission in quick time, with approvals for the mission coming in August 2011 and all the hardware assembled on the orbiter in less than two years.

On November 5, 2013, at 2.38 p.m. Indian Standard Time, Mangalyaan (Mars Craft), India’s first-ever launch outside the Earth’s sphere of influence, took off on its mission to Mars from the Sriharikota launch station, thus signifying to the world that ‘India has truly arrived in the elite club of nations to carry out Mars missions’. Indeed, it is a moment of immense pride not just for the scientific community in India, but also for a larger section of the society who believes that India can do wonders. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which has carved a niche for itself in the realm of global space research, has put Mangalyaan in the shortest possible time and the lowest budget ever.

On November 16, the ISRO performed the last of the five orbit-raising manoeuvre on its Mars Orbiter, raising the highest point of the spacecraft to over 1.92 lakh km. ISRO engineers put together the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) in quick time, with approvals for the mission coming in August 2011 and all the hardware assembled on the orbiter in less than two years. On the contrary, the new Mars mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) called MAVEN, scheduled for launch on November 18, has taken almost six years to fabricate and is nearly 10 times the cost of Mangalyaan.

India’s pride has come to fruition with an incredibly low budget of Rs. 450 crore, making it the cheapest ever venture to head for the red planet. The budgets of NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan’s JAXA are several times higher. ISRO’s budget is just three per cent of NASA’s budget for 2010. Hence, Mangalyaan’s success will give ISRO a boost in the global launch business. Mangalyaan was on ISRO’s trusted workhorse, the polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV-C25). In quick time after the launch, the spacecraft went into orbit around the Earth, signalling its start of its 300-day voyage to Mars. If everything goes well during this complex and challenging journey through deep space, Mangalyaan will enter the Mars orbit on September 24, 2014.

The highlight of the launch has been that it was the longest PSLV mission at 44 minutes. Earlier missions had lasted about 18 minutes. This was also the silver jubilee lift-off of the PSLV. Out of the 25 launches, 24 have been successful in a row. ISRO Chairman K. Radhakrishnan called the flight a copybook and textbook mission. “It was a new and complex mission in design and execution.”

More than 500 scientists from the Bengaluru-based ISRO worked round the clock on this mission. India sees the Mars mission as an opportunity to beat its regional rival China in reaching the planet, especially after a Russian mission carrying the first Chinese satellite to Mars failed in November 2011. Japan also failed in a similar effort in 1998.

“The primary objective of our mission is to see if we can reach the Mars orbit. That is the acknowledged objective. There are also scientific objectives for which the satellite carries a set of instruments,” said ISRO Chairman Radhakrishnan. The mission will also analyse the thin Martian atmosphere.

The mission objectives are both technological and scientific in nature. Here are some of the important objectives for ISRO:

• Design and realisation of a Mars Orbiter with a capability to survive and perform Earth-bound manoeuvrs, cruise phase of 300 days, Mars orbit insertion/capture and on-orbit phase around Mars.
• Deep space communication, navigation, mission planning and management.
• Exploration of Mars surface features, morphology, mineralogy and study of Martian atmosphere by indigenous scientific instruments.

After India’s successful Chandrayaan unmanned mission to the Moon in 2008 that brought back the first clinching evidence of the presence of water there, the Mars mission, according to ISRO Chairman Radhakrishnan is a “natural progression”.