Sriharikota :
Flocks of pelicans and painted storks laze around Pulicat lake, about 100km north of Chennai. Their peace would be disturbed six noons later, when a nation’s ambition for interplanetary exploration takes wing.
A few hundred metres from where the migratory birds spend their warm days, an extra large Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle would lift off at 2.38pm on Tuesday, carrying an indigenous spacecraft that would fly to Mars. The 300-day journey to the red planet would keep the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on tenterhooks – and the world in rapt attention.
“This is our first step towards another planet,” says Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan. “Learning from this mission, we will take bigger steps. Isro’s 16,000 members are working together for that.”
And that shows at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre which is a beehive of activity during the run-up to the countdown that starts at 6.08am Sunday. The 80 consoles at the mission control room flash details from 150 computers and the innumerable circuits and parameters they monitor. Giant screens show simulation of flight events, the rocket velocity and altitude. Fifty-eight hand-picked scientists remain glued to the screens that show the simulated PSLV as a climbing blip.
“It’s a rehearsal,” says V Seshagiri Rao, associate director of the spaceport. On the day of the launch, the blip would disappear from the screens for about 28 minutes. “That’s when the rocket, making a peculiar manoeuvre, would go out of the range of our radars here,” explains Rao. To track this face, Isro has, for the first time, deployed two ships fitted with radars in the South Pacific Ocean.
But right now, the 44.4-metre-tall PSLV-C25 stands on the first launch pad, 7km from the mission control room. “It’s a versatile rocket, the same we used for Chandrayaan-1,” says vehicle director B Jayakumar, showing around the launch pad. “It can put satellites in different kinds of orbits.”
This time it will, after burning four stages, put the Mars orbiter in an elliptical orbit around the earth, about 43 minutes after the lift-off. After five orbital corrections to lengthen the farthest point, the spacecraft will begin its voyage to Mars on December 1. “September 24, 2014 would be the D-Day,” explains Radhakrishnan. “That’s when the spacecraft would enter the Mars orbit.”
Going around the red planet in a highly elliptical path (365km being the nearest to Mars and 80,000km the farthest), the orbiter would sequentially switch on its five instruments to study the martian atmosphere and surface. Most crucial among the search operations would be those for deuterium and hydrogen to study possible early presence of water, and methane that may suggest biological presence on the planet.
The Isro chairman is proud, but measured when he speaks about the probability of success of the mission. “Orbiting around Mars itself is a challenge. It will be an achievement if we do it.”
Whether India’s Mars orbiter spots methane or water, the winged visitors of Pulicat lake will be frequently disturbed as Isro revs up for a series of satellite launches. The next big one: A GSLV with an Indian cryogenic engine on December 15.
source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Science> Sathish Dhawan Space Centre / by Arun Ram , TNN / October 31st, 2013