India’s mission to the red planet, Mars, will be launched next year, ahead of the mission to study the sun which was earlier scheduled to kick off in 2013.
India’s mission to the red planet, Mars, will be launched next year, ahead of the mission to study the sun which was earlier scheduled to kick off in 2013. Delays in getting the instrumentation ready for the sun mission on board the satellite Aditya-1, under the aegis of Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), and Mars coming close to Earth over the next two years has led to the change in the space schedule, experts have said.
Aditya-1 solar mission’s principal investigator and IIA scientist, Jagdev Singh, told DNA, “As most of the components (for Aditya-1) are being developed by laboratories of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and other participating organisations (Udaipur Solar Observatory, Radio Astronomy Centre and the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics), detailed specifications of the components are being worked out. This is taking a lot of time as this type of instrumentation (exclusively to study the sun) is being developed for the first time in India.”
He said Isro, which is carrying out the Mars mission, had already taken up the project that entails sending a 25 kg payload onboard the satellite that will orbit the red planet to carry out experiments to learn more about the surface and atmosphere of Earth’s closest planet in the Solar System.
“A new schedule is now being worked out (for Aditya-1),” Singh said.
Isro has three launch windows – 2013, 2016 and 2018. It takes about nine months for the Mars probe to reach the red planet, and the first launch window is some time in November 2013. The Indian space scientists are keen on taking a pot shot at Mars beginning then, Isro sources said. The Mars probe is scheduled to be launched on board Isro’s much tested warhorse, Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), which was also used to launch Chandrayaan-1, the country’s first unmanned mission to Moon in October 2008.
The main objectives of the Aditya-1 mission is to study the Coronal Mass Ejection and consequently the crucial physical parameters for space weather, such as the coronal magnetic field structures, evolution of the coronal magnetic field etc.
This will provide completely new information on the velocity fields and their variability in the sun’s inner corona having an important bearing on the unsolved problem of heating of the corona.
IIA scientists felt this is the ideal time to take up the solar mission due to the ongoing solar maxima when the solar activity is at its maximum.
Meanwhile, Isro’s Mars project got a big boost when it received a budgetary allocation of Rs125 crore for its launch earlier this year.
However, a senior Isro scientist sought to downplay the priority being given to the space agency’s Mars mission. He merely said, on condition of anonymity: “Both projects are important. Work on the Mars mission will start as soon as the government gives its final approval.”
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