India Launches First Mission Mars (PHOTO)

New Delhi, India – the world’s most populous democracy intends on making history tomorrow with the launch the country’s first unmanned space probe to Mars.

“So far, only Russia, the US and the European Space Agency (ESA) have undertaken such missions to Mars. India will be the fourth and first in Asia,” a top space agency official told IANS ahead of the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) launch from Sriharikota spaceport, about 80km northeast of Chennai.

The launch will take place not far from the southern port city of Chennai; the launch site actually is on a small island off the city’s coast.

If the launch is successful, the probe will take eleven months to travel the distance of roughly 1.5 astronomical units (~140 million miles) to the “red planet”. India hopes to cull evidence of it’s on the growing body of scientific data being collected about Mars. In the important arena of bragging rights, the launch will be an affront to China whose first ever Mars probe launch ended in failure.

The program was approved by the government in 2012.

“Our previous experience has helped a lot,” said Deviprasad Karnik, spokesman for the Indian Space Research Organisation. “We had an indigenous space craft bus already available from our moon mission and the design [for the satellite] was already available so we could do it quickly.”

“It’s a national milestone for the country to conquer territories beyond planet Earth,” said Bharath Gopalaswamy, a Chennai native who is the deputy director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. “India has its own ambitions. Just because we’re poor doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have any ambitions. That’s not the way we think about ourselves, right?”

India is down-playing any spirit of competitiveness and the spokesman for their version of “NASA” stated that the launch is merely to “showcase technological capability”. Well, if the Indian “showcase” is successful where the Chinese “showcase” clearly wasn’t, it will be hard to deny the “one-upsmanship” between the two rival nations.

The cost of the launch is $74 million. Some critics of the space program would rather see that money promote the social well-being of the nation’s millions of impoverished citizens.

Asked about the criticism that a “poor” country like India is wasting money on sending a spacecraft to Mars, Dr. Radhakrishnan said, “We want to tell this country that Mars has a relevance…Science leads to understanding… Some people ask, “Why are you spending Rs.460 crores?” Others will say that Rs.460 crores is only some four rupees per head in this country. Then some others will say it is only the price of an aircraft. So there are different ways of looking at it…We want to tell this country that this is a complex mission.”

On The Web:
India to launch Mars mission as international space race grows more competitive
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-launches-mars-mission-as-international-space-race-grows-more-competitive/2013/11/03/34f4b796-44b9-11e3-95a9-3f15b5618ba8_story.html

Mars mission countdown begins
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/countdown-begins-for-indias-mars-orbiter-mission/article5309142.ece