India's maiden Mars mission to take off by year-end

500 kg payload will look for traces of methane on the red planet

India’s maiden Mars mission will carry a space probe to look for signatures of life on the red planet.

The 500 kg payload, to be launched around October-November 2013,  will carry a methane sensor for Mars (MSM) which will look for traces of methane in Martian atmosphere. Spotting of methane gas will indicate towards presence of some form life on Mars, which could have come only from an organic life.

The Rs 450-crore Mars mission received the Cabinet approval in August, a few days before it was formally announced by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his Independence Day address.

The 2012-13 Budget sanctioned Rs 125 crore for making  instruments for the payload.
“Five payloads are under construction. We will get them by March and start integrating them into the Martian probe,” J N Goswami, director of Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, and one of principle scientists involved in designing the scientific agenda of the mission said here on the sidelines of the congress.

“We are trying very hard to let it happen by the end of this year. The slot we have is mid-October onwards. Everything is going fine at this moment and I think we would be on time by October-November,” he said.

Besides the methane sensor, other probes in the Mars mission are Lyman Alpha Photometer; Martian Exospheric Neutral Composition Analyser, Mars Colour Camera and Thermal Infrared Imaging System, which can see the earth’s nearest neighbour even in dark.

The lift-off mass of the probe is 1,350 kg, which includes 25 kg and 500 kg empty shell. This means more than 700 kg of fuel will be carried by the probe to fire thrust rockets to keep the probe in orbit and later inject it in Mars transfer trajectory after 10 months. Insertion in the final martian orbit will take place on September 22, 2014.
Scientific data collection is likely to continue at least for six months.

“People will think what can we do with such small payload. But even with small payloads, one can do good science if you have ideas,” Goswami said. “What is the composition of Mars astrosphere; how that composition was lost; is there methane on Mars and where the water on Mars vanished, are some of the unanswered questions on Mars,” he said. India will be the sixth country to launch a mission to Mars after the US, Russia, Europe, Japan and China.

The Chinese Mars exploration probe, Yinghuo 1 was launched on November 8, 2011, along with a Russian sample return spacecraft. But the journey did not take place as planned leaving both probes stranded in the space and after a week, China declared the space probe was lost.

Japan’s first Martian mission, Nozomi, was launched in 1998. But the spacecraft used up too much fuel during a trajectory correction manoeuvre and could not reach the Mars orbit. After years of attempts to retrieve it, the mission was finally declared lost in 2003.

The ESA and Nasa are planning a number of unmanned missions to Mars. While Nasa will send its MAVEN probe in 2013, ESA's ExoMars mission will be launched in 2016.