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ISRO says the primary objectives of the orbiter are to demonstrate India’s technological capability, look for signs of life and study the planet’s atmospheric composition

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO)

launch

ISRO engineers successfully completed the first of six orbit raising “Midnight Maneuver” burns at 01:17 hrs IST

Nov. 6

The goal is to gradually maneuver MOM – India’s 1st mission to the Red Planet – into a hyperbolic trajectory so that the spacecraft will

eventually arrive at the Mars Sphere of Influence after a 10 month interplanetary cruise

India’s PSLV rocket is not powerful enough to send MOM on a direct flight to Mars

The launch “placed MOM very precisely into an initial elliptical orbit around Earth

ISRO’s engineers devised a

procedure to get the spacecraft to Mars on the least amount of fuel via six “Midnight Maneuver” engine burns over the next several weeks – and at an extremely low cost

engine fires when

is at its closest point in orbit above Earth. This increases the ships velocity and gradually widens the ellipse

raises the apogee of the six resulting elliptical orbits around Earth that eventually injects MOM onto the Trans-Mars trajectory

expected to achieve escape velocity on Dec. 1 and depart Earth’s sphere of influence tangentially to Earth’s orbit to begin the 300 day

voyage

arrives in the vicinity of Mars on September 24, 2014

, NASA’s

MAVEN orbiter remains on target to launch

on Nov. 18 – from Cape Canaveral, Florida

Both MAVEN and MOM’s goal

study the Martian atmosphere , unlock the mysteries of its current atmosphere and determine how, why and when the atmosphere and liquid water was lost

MOM science teams will “work together” to unlock the secrets of Mars atmosphere and climate history

The mission required the spacecraft to leave the Earth/moon system and orbit around the sun instead

After encounters with comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985 and the famous Halley’s comet in 1986 and the study of CME’s from the sun in 1991, the “plug” was pulled in the spacecraft on 5 May 1997

have also obtained several documents from NASA as part of the development of our Space Act Agreement

Since there is no computer on board the ISEE-3 spacecraft our task is actually much easier since we are going to be directly commanding various subsystems

This is an ongoing process and we have, as usual, dug some of the pertinent information out of 35 year old IEEE or AIAA papers that are publicly available

The ISEE-3/ICE spacecraft was never really designed to be an interplanetary cruiser and thus the thrusters on board are very small

estimate that if we wait until mid-June to do the course correction that it will take 17 hours of thrusting to get the course change of about 40 meters/second that we will need at that time